Interview: Sára Cserhalmi Directed of "Dear Betrayed Friends" / Hungary, Germany, 2012 - East of the West Competition

I know your film was close to not being screened at the festival because it was not completed. Could you talk a bit about that?

S.C. The film is a degree film and we didn’t get any money from the government in Hungary. Well, not the government, but the Hungarian Film Fund. They usually give all the money for film production, but they didn’t give us any so we didn’t have enough funds to complete post production. In the end, an American company came on board. They called me and offered to help us finish by making a digital print, and because of them we were finally able to be part of the East of the West competition.

The film switches constantly between characters in terms of who is good, and who is bad. There is also no clear main character. Why is that?

S.C. I wanted it to be this way because I don’t intend to judge anyone. The nature of the subject would have given us the opportunity to judge one or the other of the characters, but I didn’t want to be the one to point out who was right and who was wrong. In fact I think nobody is entitled to do that. You can never know what reasons a person has for making such decisions.

We can see some imperfections of the Hungarian society (such as bribing doctors in the hospital) as a background to the main story. To what extent are these influenced by the country’s past? Was it your intention to emphasize them in any way?

S.C. They do come from the past, but I was concentrating mostly on the present in terms of the relationship between the two men and how they both react to the discovery that one reported on the other, following what they think and what they do.

You leave them quite a lot of time to think because the moment when they actually confront each other is constantly postponed. And when this happens there is no real confrontation as it could have been expected.

S.C. I would say that they do have a proper confrontation when Andor writes the article and Janos responds by appearing on the TV show. It is true that they never speak face to face, but there is always another way, some sort of intermediary. In the end they are both two lonely men and I think that is shown very well in the fact that even when they actually come face to face, at the door, neither of them is able to speak to the other.

By Mirona Nicola