Abstract

Virtually nothing has been written about Hungary's three pioneering women film directors in English or Hungarian. The only mentions of the three directors and their films are found in throwaway comments in Hungarian works of film history, in an incorrect entry in a national filmography (Varga 1999), and in a dismissive article of 1985, which ignores one of the three films altogether. This article seeks to make up for this critical and historiographical oversight. This article asks why did these filmmakers succeed; and why and how did they succeed in an industry so utterly dominated by men? The other aim of this article is to move beyond discovery, and read the films in their context to assess the contribution they made to national cinema and the dominant nationalist discourse in interwar and wartime Hungary.