What a week! The weather feels like spring. After we felt that we might need our winter coats as early as September, the temperatures rose back to 18°C in the last couple of days. An amazing Indian summer showed Budapest’s trees more than the sunshine in September, and the orange and golden leaves compliment the city even better than green trees. It is absurd how we felt that there is nothing green in the city, and now there are discolored trees all over the place. In the course of Verzio documentary film festival, the weather was an absurd balance to the disturbing “a film unfinished” that I saw Wednesday night. It was more by accident that we ended up watching a documentary about a 1942 propaganda film, but in retrospect, it was good that we did. It took us the entire evening of discussions and conversations to comprehend what we had just seen, and it’s hard to grasp how we usually abstract horror so we can talk about it lightly. There’s no need to talk lightly, we decided. It was good that we had to see the images of the Warsaw Ghetto.
That’s also why I decided to join a discussion round about the filmmaker’s role in documentary movies on Friday. On my way to Arany Janos Utca, I took a couple of pictures. Everything seemed to be glowing and radiating. At Arany Janos Metro station, where I was going to meet Lisa, I was baffled with Dejá Vu. This was where we walked past, three years ago, or four years ago? Konni, Felix, Laura and I. We bought postcards at this metro station, and breakfast, before we marched to the Basilica with our huge backpacks. It was our last day in Budapest, and we didn’t like it very much. Arany Janos changed. Maybe it didn’t. There are still a few homeless people, it still does not look nice, and the little benches that we sat on to eat still looked exactly the same. I was surprised that I remembered so well...I’ve been here for over two months now, and the only time my first visit to Budapest came to mind was on Margit Sziget, when I saw the statue on which Laura and I sat for a photograph.
The discussion round was alright. A colorful mix of students, researchers and film enthusiasts, a few documentaries, the setting of the beautiful Open Society Archives. It made sense to be there, and it felt alright, and the Archives amazed me for being so little like, well, archives. They look rather like a museum-slash-library, with an exhibition on the ground floor, libraries and laboratories on the first and second floors. The building, inside and out, and the small cafeteria next to it, do not look like they should be in the vicinity of Arany Janos Metro station. But this is what makes Budapest it.
Yesterday I had set out for a walk to the park, which required me to take Tram 2 to Vörösmarty Ter and then the Metro to the City Park. In the tram, a nice breeze came through the open windows and the sun shone on my face. I got a text message from Claudia asking me to come to Csendes Café, so I changed my plans and walked through the leaves and the grass at Vigado Ter and through the city (without a map!) to the lovely, lovely Csendes. I passed Gerlóczy Kavéhaz, one of my favorite coffee houses. It’s off the beaten track and the pictures of Martin Mukacsi’s exhibition hang on the string of lights outside. Also, obviously, they serve very good coffee.
While I am stuck with mixed impressions, I guess I can mention a paperclip I found outside an antiquarian bookshop in Lonyay Utca a few days ago. It is rather unspectacular; Lonyay utca is filled with paperclips, especially around the book store, copy shop and university. But as a metaphorical paperclip, here’s a tie between a movie I will watch at Verzio today: It’s called “war and love in Kabul”, which suits my newly discovered interest in world politics quite well.
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