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1989: A Statesman Opens Up
Directed by Anders Ostergaard and Erzsebet Racz
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No one was more surprised than 40-year-old academic economist Miklos Nemeth when he was named the Prime Minister of Hungary. The year was 1989 and communism was on the brink of collapse and Nemeth, an outsider with few friends in the Party, was suddenly responsible for the seemingly impossible task of saving the country from bankruptcy.

1989: A STATESMAN OPENS UP takes viewers behind the scenes of Nemeth's administration during the most critical year in recent European history. As Nemeth travels to Berlin, Bonn, Bucharest and Moscow, meeting with his increasingly worried fellow Warsaw Pact leaders and German Chancellor Helmut Kohl, the film reveals the role that developments in Hungary played in the fall of the Berlin Wall and subsequent collapse of Communism throughout Eastern Europe.

Convinced that free elections were coming and that the Communist Party would lose them, Nemeth seeks to avoid a repeat of the events of 1956, when Hungarians' rebellion against Soviet domination ended with tanks in the streets.

Within the space of a few months, he seeks the blessing of Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, sidelines hardliners, and navigates the crisis that erupts within the Party when the body of Prime Minister Imre Nagy, one of the heroes of the 1956 Hungarian Revolution, is discovered in a Budapest field.

Finally, when Nemeth allows tens of thousands of East Germans to flee to the West across the Hungarian border with Austria, he makes the historic events that would soon grip Berlin inevitable.

1989: A STATESMAN OPENS UP uses transcripts of high-level meetings read by actors, contemporary interviews with Nemeth, and extensive archival footage to create a sense of immediacy and urgency in telling this pivotal, remarkable story.

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"Intelligently moulded, filmically provocative, entertaining and informative."Tue Steen Muller, Filmkommentaren

"The mix of archive material and interviews works well."Michael Soby, CPH-Culture

"The story of possibly the last victim of the Iron Curtain, who paid the supreme price."Natalie Yahya Rosendahl, Magasinet OST

"Puts us on the same plane as the characters."Klaus Rifbjerg, Ekko

"Reconstructions laden with reality and archival material buried beneath the Iron Curtain in equal measure relate the tale of the demise of the Eastern Bloc."Rikke Collin, Filmcitat

Winner, Cultural & General Interest Category, Prix Italia Award for TV Documentary 2014
CPH:DOX Documentary Film Festival 2014
Hong Kong International Film Festival 2014
DocAviv International Documentary Film Festival 2014
Goteborg International Film Festival 2014

58 minutes / Color
English subtitles
Release: 2015
Copyright: 2014

For colleges, universities, government agencies, hospitals and corporations

This DVD is sold with a license for institutional use and Public Performance rights.

Subject areas:
Comparative Government, Eastern Europe, History (World), Hungary, Political Science, Politics

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