BUDAPEST LETTER
The boxes are not yet fully unpacked, and students and their teachers are still lost in the gigantic premises of the Central European University (CEU), located in the heart of Budapest.
“I’m sorry, I don’t know all the rooms yet”, apologizes Kata Csato, a teacher, desperately trying to find herself in the maze of almost deserted corridors of this higher establishment founded and financed by the American billionaire George Soros. Since becoming the number one enemy of Hungarian Nationalist Prime Minister Viktor Orban, most of CEU’s students and professors, as well as their leadership, have been forced to move to Vienna, Austria.
Kata Csato has taken their place since the beginning of September with a large hundred students and sixty teachers. ” [Ces derniers] told us that it felt good to see students again ”, she smiles. At 44 years old, this dynamic and charismatic artist, teacher of puppets, is at the head of a project which seemed still unhoped for a few months ago: the creation of a new “free university of cinema and theater” on the rubble. of that on which a relative of the nationalist prime minister, Attila Vidnyanszky, took control in the summer of 2020. Director and director of the National Theater, he wants to be a fervent defender of a theater “Christian and conservative”.
This new attack on academic freedom in this Central European nation already known for its multiple abuses in the rule of law had resulted in 2020 in resistance on a rare scale.
Solidarity of European schools
Demonstrations, occupations of premises, actions of disruption … the students of the SZFE, for Szinhaz- és Filmmuvészeti Egyetem in Hungarian, had fought like never before to preserve the autonomy of this one hundred and fifty year old establishment which marked the entire history of Hungarian cinema. But they had finally had to lift the siege, at the beginning of November 2020, when the second confinement was declared in Hungary.
At that time, not many people paid dearly for the Free SZFE movement (“Free SZFE”). “A lot of people told us that we had lost, but they were wrong”, smiles Kata Csato, who herself resigned in February 2021 from her post at the former SZFE, along with thirty other teachers. Thanks to the immovable motivation of a handful of students and teachers, supported by an unprecedented and incredible gesture of solidarity from other theater and film schools in Europe, it has indeed launched what has been called the “program. emergency rescue ”of his former students.
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