HUNGARIAN AMERICANS
HUNGARIAN AMERICANS

Summary/Abstract: There were two documentary films at the forty-first Hungarian Film Festival in February 2010 that dealt with Hungarian Americans. Hunky blues – The American Dream by Péter Forgács, which portrays the great wave of immigration to the United States between 1890 and 1921. The director uses a multitude of early film clips, photographs, and interviews, adding thereby a new dimension and greater quality. He primarily uses the collection of the ethnographer Elemér Bakó. The documentaries are poignant; he quotes the famous lines from Attila József about a million and a half of our people sleepwalking into America. The film not only shows the promised land, but portrays also the conditions at home alongside the tense feelings of the immigrants. Interpellations in the parliament can be heard, for example, as early as 1903, and the reason for the large scale emigration is attributed to lost patriotism. 1.2 million people emigrated to the United States from the whole Austro-Hungarian Monarchy, in the years leading up to 1913, including half a million Hungarians. Did they step into the unknown because they felt hopeless at home? This is a question which the film sets out to answer.

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