First Veszprém-Balaton Film Picnic a huge success

Visitors of the first Veszprém-Balaton Film Picnic were shown film classics and award winners of this year’s Motion Picture Festival free of charge at atmospheric locations near Lake Balaton from 3rd to 5th September. The film event started off with the open-air screening of Béla Bagota’s crime film Valan in Veszprém castle, and closed on Balatonfüred’s Tagore Promenade with  Those Who Remained, an Academy Awards shortlisted and Hungarian Film Award winner feature by Barnabás Tóth.

All open-air screenings attracted full houses, and some  – e.g. István Bujtor’s classic Pogány madonna (Pagan Madonna) –  were watched by many from standing places outside the cordons.

Both screenings of Attila Hartung’s FOMO, which talks about the dark side of social media in the language of generation Z, followed by the talk organised by the University of Pannonia, were a great success, and brought this important current issue closer to viewers, the generation involved, and their parents. In addition to meeting the director, audiences also had the chance to start a dialogue with the leading female actor Panna László, the face of this year’s Film Picnic.

Tamás Buvári’s film Magdolna, which is about two dramatic days in the life of Magdi Bódi, murdered in 1945, was given a pre-premiere screening. “Long queues were waiting in front of the auditorium: Veszprém city clearly owned this feature which was produced with wide local cooperation,” – said Dr. Péter Muszatics, Film picnic’s programme director, and added: “The multiple award-winning documentary by Szabó Réka, The Euphoria of Being was also shown at nearly full house, and was a nice connecting element to the Dance Festival, which started on 6th.”

Attila Till was host to the event and moderator to several filmmakers-meet-audience sessions as well as the professional conference Cinema in the Time of Epidemy, where producers and distributors were trying to find answers to the most burning issues of this radically new situation.

In his closing talk, Hungarian Film Commissioner Csaba Káel stressed: “This is a very important meeting, as this is the first time that the European Capital of Culture programme has met Hungarian films. This is crucial because Hungarian films can rarely escape from Budapest. This escape attempt has turned out really well, because we have had a lot of good experiences here in Veszprém and Balatonfüred. We consider the improvement of contacts between the Veszprém-Balaton 2023 European Capital of Culture programme, the National Film Institute, and the Hungarian motion picture sector very important, because it would be good to get to 2023 having made more and more people meet Hungarian films. We would like Film Picnic to be an element in the birth of a “Hungarian Cannes.”