In his work Péter Forgács presents a poetic overview of the Hungarian terrain in the twentieth century, with the use of magically composed, scratched found footage. As before, he collaborates with composer Tibor Szemzõ, whose mesmerizing music glides us through Hungarian and Middle European history and landscape. A Bibó Reader brings us closer to the eternal and crystal-clear conclusions of the greatest Hungarian political thinker of the 20th century. István Bibó, philosopher, and minister during the 1956 Hungarian revolution, was sentenced to life imprisonment, but later released under an amnesty. He never gave up his faith in freedom. The sensitive rendering of Bibó’s social and historical analysis, the meditative texts pace this unique film vision from one chapter to the next. The fascinating images and sounds offer the viewer the unexpectedly special and profound experience. —forgacspeter.hu
Péter Forgács (1950) media artist and independent filmmaker, based in Budapest. Since 1978 he has made more than thirty films and several media installations. He is best known for his “Private Hungary” series of award winning films and installations often based on home movies from the 1920s-1980s, which document ordinary lives that were soon to be ruptured by an extraordinary historical trauma that occurs off screen.
Since the early 1990s Forgács’ video installations have been presented at museums and art galleries throughout Europe and America. His international debut came with The Bartos Family (1988). Since then he has received several international festival awards – in New York, Budapest, Lisbon, Marseilles, San Francisco and Berlin, where he won the Prix Europa for Free Fall film in 1997. Between 2000-2002 Forgács was artist in residence at The Getty Museum/Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles, where he created The Danube Exodus: Rippling Currents of the River installation… read more