Documentary screening & presentation
February 25, 2025, 5:40 PM, CEU Campus, Vienna, Austria
In collaboration with the Visual Studies Platform, we invite the students of the Central European University to a screening of two short documentaries, created twenty years apart, that explore marginalized communities and overlooked aspects of everyday visual culture in the East-Central European region. Following the screenings, Róza Tekla Szilágyi and Endre Cserna of Eidolon Centre, will present on the contexts and history of studying everyday photography in Hungary, as well as their institutions work. An open discussion on people’s unique relationships with 20th-century image-making, memory, and representation, led by Oksana Sarkisova, will conclude the event.
Please note that the event is exclusively open to the students of CEU.
CSENDORSZÁG (“Silence Country”), 2002.
director: Róbert Lakatos
cinematographer: Arthur Bálint
37 min.
The young teenager Alfi has a hearing impairment. He is studying at a special needs school in Cluj-Napoca. During the summer holidays he returns to his home village in Gyimes. Through the efforts of his father he receives an old camera from the local deaf-mute photographer. While he begins to learn the art of photography he is forced to communicate with those around him. With the help of photography Alfi begins to discover people.
THESE ARE NOT OUR MEMORIES, 2022.
director: Aseneth Suarez Ruiz, Patrick Alexander
cinematographer: Carlos Arango de Montis
23 min.
Some of our memories are vivid, others dim, some of us want to remember it all, others try to forget. When the filmmakers find a discarded box of family photographs on a street in Budapest, they set on a quest to see personal stories behind the images. What awakens a personal memory? And how much fantasy and projection is evoked by the images? Walking a thin line between memory and imagination, the filmmakers adopt the discarded traces of the lives of others. Whose memories are these?
The films will be screened in their original languages with English subtitles.
