István Szabó
István Szabó (born February 18, 1938) is a Hungarian film director, screenwriter, and opera director. Szabó is the most internationally acclaimed Hungarian filmmaker since the late 1960s. Working in the tradition of European auteurs, he has made films that address the political and psychological conflicts, evident in Central Europe’s recent history. He made his first short film in 1959 as a student at the Hungarian Academy of Theatrical and Cinematic Arts, and his first feature film in 1964.
He achieved great international success with Mephisto (1981), which won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film. Since then, most of Szabó’s films have been international co-productions filmed in a variety of languages and European locations. He has continued, however, to make films in Hungarian, and often used Hungary and Hungarian human capital in his international co-productions. Szabó became involved in national controversy in 2006 when Life and Literature, a Hungarian newspaper, revealed him as an informant of Communist secret police.
Born in Budapest, Szabó was the son of Mária (née Vita) and István Szabó. The latter was a doctor coming from a long line of doctors. Szabó came from a family of Jews who had converted to Catholicism, but were considered Jews by the Arrow Cross Party (Hungarian Nazis). The family was forced to separate and hide in Budapest sometime between October 1944, when Nazi Germany occupied Hungary and placed in power the Arrow Cross, and February 1945, when the Soviets defeated the German Army in Budapest. Szabó survived by hiding at an orphanage, but his father died of diphtheria shortly after the German defeat. Memories of these events would later appear in several of his films.
Regarding his connection to Communist secret police, he submitted, between 1957 and 1961, forty-eight reports on seventy-two people, mostly classmates and teachers at the Academy of Theatrical and Cinematic Arts. According to historian Istvan Deak, only in one case did Szabó’s information cause significant damage, when an individual was denied a passport. After the article in Life and Literature was published, over one hundred prominent intellectuals, including people Szabó had denounced, published a letter in support of him. Szabó’s initial response to the article was that his provision of information had been an act of bravery intended to save the life of former classmate Pál Gábor. When this claim turned out not to be true, Szabó admitted that his true motive had been to prevent his own expulsion from the Academy.
In the 1960s and ‘70s, Istvan Szabo directed Hungarian films, which explored his own generation’s experiences and Hungary’s recent past (Apa (1966); Szerelmesfilm (1970); Tuzoltó utca 25. (1973)). His signature film trilogy consists of Mephisto (1981, winner of an Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film and a Cannes Award for the Best Screenplay), Colonel Redl (1984, winner of a Jury Prize at the Cannes Festival) and Hanussen (1988). He turned to English-language films making Meeting Venus (1991), Sunshine (1999), Taking Sides (2001) and most recently Being Julia (2004), which garnered an Oscar nomination for actress Annette Bening.
His most acclaimed films grew from ongoing collaborations with famed Austrian actor Klaus Maria Brandauer, and friend cinematographer Lajos Koltai. In 1996 he was awarded with the Hungarian Pulitzer Memory Prize (not be confused with the original Pulitzer Prize) for his TV documentary series, “The hundred years of cinema”.
