Distorted Session #10: Focus on Hungary

Hungarian media artist and filmmaker Péter Forgács will be in attendance to present his 1992 experimental film *Arizona Diary* (53 min.), which documents a journey through Arizona with Hungarian poet György Petri—whose verses are featured in the film—and neo-avant-garde artist György Galántai, founder of the Artpool research center in Budapest. The film also briefly features Steina and Woody Vašulka, well-known video artists. The film explores the genre of the film diary itself and tests its limits.  The screening will be followed by a discussion with the filmmaker.

PÉTER FORGÁCS (*1950) is the creator of film essays and installations, including the acclaimed extensive series *Private Hungary*, which draws on a collection of found footage from amateur films dating from the 1930s to the 1970s, capturing people’s everyday lives against the backdrop of historical traumas. Forgács was part of the Béla Balász film studio in Budapest and was also one of the editors of the video magazine *Infermental*. In 1983, he founded the Private Photo & Film Archives Foundation (PPFA), a collection of amateur film recordings, in Budapest. Between 2000 and 2002, based on his 1998 film of the same name, he created the interactive multimedia installation *The Danube Exodus: The Danube Exodus: Rippling Currents of the River, which incorporates found amateur film footage capturing the journeys of refugees along the Danube, shot by ship captain Nándor Andrásovits between 1939 and 1940. It was first exhibited at the Getty Center in Los Angeles and later toured many European countries. The work was also released as a CD-ROM. He has received numerous awards for his film work.