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TO OCT. 30
Fifty years ago, Soviet tanks rolled into Budapest, enforcing Moscow’s definition of communism and leaving hundreds of thousands of Hungarians dead or exiled. The two remaining programs in this series compile short films and excerpts from longer ones; one set offers a contemporary (and American) view of the events, while the other is all from 1957–1958 and mostly from the perspective of Hungary’s then-government. The first program (at 6:30 p.m. Monday, Oct. 23) features No Greater Love(pictured), a fictionalized true-life tale of American journalist on the Austrian side of the border; his brooding about his unhappy family is interrupted by the sight of a man risking himself to get his wife and children out of Hungary. Also included are Freedom Dance, an animated film derived from a Hungarian refugee’s sketches of his 1956 trip to the United States; and excerpts from Torn From the Flag, a documentary about the long-term effects of Hungary’s 1956 uprising; and from Budapest to Gettysburg, the story of a Hungarian Jewish refugee who escaped to the states and became an authority on the American Civil War rather than immerse himself in his own past. The second selection (at 6:30 p.m. Monday, Oct. 30) includes a 1956 BBC report on the Hungarian Revolution, two short newsreels on communist festivities in the post-uprising nation, and How It Happened, a 1957 Hungarian film that explains the country’s slip-up in the characteristically stilted terms of Warsaw Pact propaganda. The films show at the Goethe-Institut Washington, 812 7th St. NW. Free. (202) 289-1200. (Mark Jenkins)