Washington, DC – On March 14, 2010, the Executive Committee of the Hungarian American Coalition (Coalition) approved the grant request of Coalition member Réka Pigniczky to support the presentation of her film “Incubator”, a documentary about growing up Hungarian in the United States.
The 84-minute documentary, which addresses the ethnic identity of the Hungarian American community in the United States, will be shown in several U.S. cities during a two-week screening tour sponsored by the Hungarian American Coalition, from May 15 – 31. The tour will include the cities of New Brunswick and Garfield in NJ, Washington, D.C., Philadelphia, New York, Boston, Atlanta, Detroit, San Francisco, as well as Berkeley and Portola Valley in CA. The Coalition will help with the film’s promotion and distribution in the United States.
Later in 2010, the film will be presented in other U.S. cities, as well, including the Itt-Ott (Hungarian Communion of Friends) conference in August and the Hungarian Filmweek in Los Angeles in November. Attached is a flyer on the film in English and Hungarian and the schedule. The schedule will be updated at the Hungarian American community websitehttp://thegulyaspot.com.
The director of the film, Réka Pigniczky, was born and raised in the U.S. by Hungarian parents who fled Hungary during the 1956 revolution and freedom fight. Her film tells the story of an unlikely, albeit dramatic reunion – involving a Hungarian rock opera performed in California’s Sierra Nevada mountains by a cast of 40-something Hungarian-Americans. They meet in the same place they performed “Stephen, the King” 25 years earlier, during a summer camp in 1984, when they were still teenagers. That summer the Soviets still had tanks stationed in Hungary, and the country was isolated behind the Iron Curtain. Many of these scouts had never been to Hungary, where their parents were born. The reunion of this original cast, now living all over the world including Budapest, makes for an emotional and hilarious portrait of one of many ethnic ‘incubators’ operating in the U.S. over the years. They’re meeting not only to reminisce, but also to figure out just who they’ve become, 20 years after the ‘motherland’ was liberated.
The film premiered in Budapest at the National Filmweek and will be running in selected Hungarian theaters starting June 3.