Filming the Far Right in Poland and Hungary

Screening of the 2007 documentary on Hungarian far-right rock music Rocking the Nation (Borbala Kriza) and fragments of an unedited version of the film Polish Prayers (Hanna Nobis), followed by a discussion with the directors

• Rocking the Nation (original title: Dübörög a nemzeti rock), documentary by Borbala Kriza, Hungary, 2007, 70 min., Hungarian with English subtitles
  A concert tour with the rock band Romantikus Erőszak (Romantic Violence) and its fans to get insights into the Hungarian radical right-wing youth subculture. Folk musicians and skinheads, football supporters and college students speak of their radical nationalistic views. The slogans are rocking: freedom, anti-Communism, Trianon, the Jews, 100% Hungarian, to arms! But what happens when words turn to action?
• Polish Prayers (original title: Prawy chłopak), a documentary by Hanna Nobis, Poland, 2022, unedited fragments, 20 min.
  In Polish Prayers, the filmmaker Hanna Nobis accompanies, over the course of four years, 22-year-old Antek, a member of  the ultra-conservative group Polish Brotherhood. The Brotherhood organises counter-demonstrations to LGBTQI+ events and meets for masculinity rituals in the forest. When Antek is about to be promoted to become a leader of the group, he begins to question the moral principles he has spent years fighting for.

The directors will discuss the evolution of the far-right movements in Poland and Hungary over the last 20 years and the role of popular culture in this process, as well as the dilemmas and methods of filmmakers who approach groups from the radical right.

Panel convenors: Aleksandra Szczepan, Indira Anna Hajnács

Borbala Kriza is a sociologist, oral history researcher, and documentary filmmaker. Currently she works for the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum collecting video testimonies and documenting the Holocaust and World War 2 in Europe. She has been a research fellow and visiting lecturer at Eotvos Lorand University, Central European University and University of Art and Design, Budapest. She has published extensively in the field of political ideologies, xenophobia, anti-Semitism and collective memory in Central Europe. Her volume Identities, Ideologies and Representations in Post-Transition Hungary was published in
2012 (with Mária Heller). She co-directed several award-winning documentary films including Once They Were Neighbors (2005) on Holocaust memory and was the director of the internationally acclaimed documentary Rocking the Nation (2007) on far-right youth subculture in Hungary. In 2020 the Hungarian Raoul Wallenberg Association awarded her the Maria Ember Prize “for lifetime achievement and for Holocaust research”.

Hanna Nobis, born in 1990 in Białystok, Poland. After her Interdisciplinary Studies at the University of Warsaw, she acted in Polish theatres, created videos, installations and costumes. Her debut feature-length documentary Polish Prayers (2022) premiered at IDFA and went on to participate in over twenty festivals. In 2023 she was rewarded with a Zurich Film Award for directing in the Documentary category.

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