Vadászat angolokra (Hunting for Englishmen)

15:00
28 Oktober 2007
Europe on Screen 2007

Free ticket available 30 min before opening


Goethe Haus - Capacity: 301 seats
Jl. Sam Ratulangi 9 – 15, Menteng, Jakarta Pusat - T 2355 0208

Djedjak Darah
M Aprisiyanto, 2004, 12 min.
Indonesia, Fiction

Hunting for Englishmen
Bertalan Bagó, 2005, 86 min.
Hungary. Drama. Hongarian with English subtitles.
A hunting party has assembled in Hungary in 1839; it includes an English engineer who may be a spy for the British Foreign Secretary.

The characters in this story are gathered as a group for a hunt in a place called Hungary. The group includes an English engineer who settled in Pressburg. He has daring ideas with which to achieve Hongarian economic progress and thereby the country’s independence. His enthusiasm is further energized by a secret, romantic affection felt towards one of the woman in the group.

The problem starts when the hunt got the attention of the Hapsburg secret service. It is 1839. It is nine years before the revolutions and wars of independence that will sweep through the continent, when Europe will again recognize a country that has always been around, but still doesn’t exist.

filmhu: How did the idea of this historic movie materialize?

B.B.: I found a memoir from the early 1800s by an English gentleman named Blackwall, who was visiting Hungary at the time. He was a railway engineer, he worked on the Trieste railway line, and he fell in love with Hungary and Hungarians – he even wrote a play about them. I found it very strange and interesting that an Englishman comes here and falls in love with this country: we’re in the 1830s, more than a decade before the revolution, when there was practically nothing here, it was a forlorn, backward country. That was my starting point – why did this Englishman come here? It was unclear whether had been sent here and was some kind of a spy – he was a relative of the English foreign minister at the time, so it is possible that he wrote his reports to him. We’re in the period following the Polish revolution crushed by the Russian tzar, when it was already clear that the wave of revolution will sweep over Europe – the political situation was quite tense in that period.
That was our starting point, we came up with a fictitious plot. The screenplay was written by Vilmos Csaplár, it is about an English engineer, who comes to Hungary because a count named a Falussy commissions him to construct a railway line leading to his stone quarry. The wife of this count is Polish by birth, she has a niece orphaned in the Polish war of independence, the Russian tzar had her entire family killed, so she comes to stay at the count’s estate in Hungary. They want to marry her to a Hungarian nobleman, Tarnai, but in the meantime, the English engineer arrives and the two fall in love. So we have a love triangle, plus the Austrian secret service is also spying on the inhabitants of the castle, since it is interested in the activities of rebel Hungarian noblemen.

filmhu: What did you find most interesting in this plot?

B.B.: I’m excited by everyhing that is old, classical, filtered by time – it had already happened, it’s past, nevertheless, if it still has similarities to the present day, it might hold a serious lesson for us. Like Cicero said: „history is the teacher of life.” We have a story from 150 years ago, which is so timely and topical that while you’re watching it, you realize that it could take place today, so it might have a stronger effect than making a film about a present-day political subject. The historic situation, the problems of society are very similar to the present, just as our relationship to Europe and the ways whe can develop. [Text and Picture: FilmHu]


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