Award-Winning Filmmaker Péter Forgács at CEU Monday

This Monday at CEU, award-winning Hungarian filmmaker Péter Forgács will screen The Danube Exodus, his seminal 1998 film about the voyage of 900 Slovak and Austrian Jews who attempted to reach the Black Sea via the Danube en route to Palestine just before World War II.

In what has become the filmmaker's hallmark “found footage” style, Forgács created the film from amateur video taken by one of the boat's captains, who documented the trip and its passengers. His best-known work, Private Hungary, uses home videos of ordinary Hungarians from 1930 to 1960 to re-tell how their lives were affected by the war.

In the 1970s, Forgács became active in Budapest’s underground art scene, and later worked as an independent filmmaker at the Béla Balázs Film Studio. He made his international debut with The Bartos Family (1988), which won the Grand Prix at the World Wide Video Festival in The Hague in 1990. Forgács has since received awards at international film festivals in Budapest, Lisbon, Marseilles, San Francisco, New York and Berlin. In 2007, he won the Erasmus Prize, an annual award from the Dutch Praemium Erasmianum Foundation that honors exceptional contributions to European culture.

Monday’s screening will be followed by a discussion with Forgács, who will be joined by Dragan Klaic, visiting professor in CEU's Department of Public Policy, and Andrea Peto, Department of Gender Studies. The event begins at 6 p.m. in the Auditorium.

For more information, visit CEU's events listings.