association

Association. During our stay in Mataró, after a while we realized that strangely it reminds us to a hungarian city, where we have worked several times. Dunaújváros is in 60 km distance from Budapest, set on the side of the river Danube. It is a traditionally working city, as its was born with the factories around it. On the other hand it is an important cite for art, as the Institute of Contemporary Art Dunaújváros is based here, which supports young art and contemporary moovements. The firs generation of artists mooved here in the late 50’s, early 60’s, as they were employed in the factories. It was one of the few cities where artists were integrated with their work into the life of the factories, and the city. The new generations are independent, and many of them move to the capital, but the city still has a extraordinary contact to art.

Our aim is, to introduce this city, and make a formal connection in between Dunaújváros and Mataró.

Dunaújváros (Between 1951–1961 was named as Sztálinváros which means Stalin City) is a city in Central Hungary, along the Danube (Hungarian name: Duna) river. It is in the county of Fejér.

History Dunaújváros is one of the newest cities of the country. It was built in the 1950s during the industrialization of the country under Socialist rule, as a new city next to an already existing village, Dunapentele.

Dunapentele: The area has been inhabited since ancient times. When Western Hungary was a Raman province under the name Pannonia, a military camp and a town called Intercisa stood in this place, at the border of the province. The Hungarians conquered the area in the early 10th century. The village Pentele, named after the medieval Greek saint, Pantaleon, was founded shortly after.

Between 1541 and 1688 the village was under Ottoman rule, and during the 15-year war it was completely destroyed. During the freedom fight led by Prince Francis II. Rákóczi the place was deserted again. In the 18th the village began to prosper. In 1830 the village got the right to hold two market days every week. In 1831 there was a cholera epidemic and the peasants revolted. In 1833 Pentele was granted town status (oppidum) by Ferdinand V. The citizens took part in the freedom fight in 1848-49.

After the Second World War the new, Communist government started a major industrialisation programme, in support of its rearmament efforts. In 1949 Dunaújváros was chosen as site of the largest iron and steel works. Originally they were to be built close to Mohács, but the Hungarian- Yugoslavian relations worsened, and this new site was chosen, farther away from the Yugoslav border. The city was designed to have 25.000 residents.

The construction of the city began on May 2, 1950, near Dunapentele. Within one year more than 1000 housing units were built and the factory complex was under construction. The city took the name of Stalin officially on April 4.1952; its name was Sztálinváros, "Stalin City" as a parallel to Stalingrad in the USSR.

The metal works were opened by 1954. The city had a population of 27,772 at this time; 85% of them lived in nice, comfortable apartments, while about 4,200 people still lived in uncomfortable barracks which originally provided "homes" for the construction workers.

In the middle of the 1950s, public transport was organized, buses carrying 24,000 passengers each day. During the 1950s many cultural and sports facilities were built, the Endre Ságvári Primary School being the largest school in Central Europe in the 1960s.

In 1956, the construction was hindered by an earthquake and a flood, and in October by the start of the 1956 Hungarian Revoluion. During the revolution the city used its historical name Dunapentele again. The Rákóczi radio station, which was created by the revolutionaries, was broadcasting from Dunapentele (in fact from a bus that was constantly moving around in the city so that it couldn't be located.) Even though the citizens of Dunapentele tried to defend their city, the Soviet army occupied the city on November 1956. The city fell under martial law, Russian tanks were standing everywhere.

After the revolution the city was still the "trademark city" of socialism in Hungary, and was presented as such to foreign visitors. Among the visitors were Yuri Gagarin and the Indonesian president Sukarno. The city also provided scenery to popular movies.

In 1960, the ten-year-old city already had 31,000 residents to celebrate its anniversary.

On November 26, 1961 the city's name was changed to Dunaújváros (Duna|új|város meaning Danube-new-city; "new city on the Danube". See also Tiszaújváros) as a consequence of Stalin's death (1956) and the Hungarian Revolution (1956).

The DUNAFERR factory complex is still is a determinant enterprise in the Hungarian steel industry, and a major employer in the area.

Today "New Danube City" is home to many new infrastructures (New Danube bridge, direct highway link between Budapest and Dunaújváros) and the new South Korean Hankook factory, Europe's biggest tire factory of Hankook. This and other projects make Dunaújváros a new Hungarian boomtown.

Twin towns: Dunaújváros is twinned with: Elbasan, Albania; Linz, Austria; Silistra, Bulgaria; Villejuif, France; Terni, Italy; Giurgius, Romania; Sremska Mitrovica, Serbia; Inegöl, Turkey; Alchevk, Ukraine.

http://www.dunaujvaros.hu/

Institute of Contemporary Art Dunaújváros: http://www.ica-d.hu/

role of work

The role of work. The IES Pla d’en Boet, the school where our participants learn, is located in the suburbs; most families whose children come to this school are attached to the area because of their work. Some came to live here in their hope for work.

Finding workplace is primarily economic demand, but at the same time there are social or psychological expectations and effects attached to it. The jobs attained, adapting yourself to the community of your new workplace result in a new type of identity and gives you a chance for respect and integration.

language

Language. The creation of the film as well as the realisation of the research was strongly influenced by language competence. How well can we make ourselves understood by participants? Although we were prepared to this, we were surprised at times. An important experience was to realize that we were not able to work with a translator.

Kids had to adapt to our poor knowledge of language. They had to be patient. In their excitement to understand us, and make us understand them, they tried to tell what they wanted in different ways, which was amusing for them, and also developed their verbal competence. They not only had to concentrate on being understood, but also to understand what we wanted to express, therefore during work they often repeated what Katalin told, to be shore, they really understood what she wanted to say. This competence is important even between native speakers. They also developed their non-verbal communication skills, as we often had to find out movements, gestures to be understood – which was also a great advantage for the film.

presence

Presence. It had a great impact on the work how seriously children took the project. When working together with us, at shooting or at other tasks they took it very seriously, they were very active and worked with pleasure on acting out, brain-storming, or writing the scenes.

On the other hand, for some hidden reason they quite often missed out our sessions. Maybe they were busy with their daily tasks, school, family, and friends. This was quite unfavourable in the sense that we had less time for working together, for example out of two Saturdays of shooting only some of them appeared on the first, and the second we had to put off as nobody could attend the session. Other times only some of the kids were missing, but this still set back our work. Each time we had to be very flexible with our plans, so we practically changed the programme day by day. There were scenes that we left out from the film and others that we spontaneously edited to the project. /One of these was the love story of Rosa María and Demba or that Deniel’s role (the father) was acted by András./

Interest was not only related to other “businesses”. Framing the film is a creative, zippy and fascinating work which gives an opportunity to self-expression, emergence. Those, who are not actually performing, are bored. Often they have to wait for the equipment or the scenes to be shot again and again. If someone does not see the goal in front of his eyes permanently – and 14 year old kids see it less as the older teens – they loose interest in work quickly. The difference in the interest of the 3 “sides” gave special dynamics to the development of the project. Monika was interested in the research, observation, therefore in the process. Katalin wanted to finish the film, therefore she was stressing the production. Kids wanted different things, mainly fast success in their personal relations and in acting.

process

Age. According to Katalin, the other factor that influences the work is the fact, that as opposed to our previous plans we chose a younger age range for making them film with. It is more complicated to work with them intensively (compared to 20-year-old youngsters), also making them describe phenomena is more difficult. By all means, more time is needed from the point of both the shooting and the research. Acting does not part from their real selves at this age.

process

The selection process: 8 May, Tuesday We started to search for possible partners and participant teens. First, we went to Cerdanyola district to see a foundation which supported children and teenagers who lived in the neighbourhood. Children aged 8-20 attend this institution, children from predominantly immigrant families. The older ones often cone only because, despite the fact that they grew up here, they did not get citizenship or work permit automatically, and if they are not employed illegally, they just walk around aimlessly. At the foundation they can use the computers and take part in the educational programmes.

Teachers emphasize that youngsters attending the institution are usually hard to deal with, and rather undermotivated. Most of them sometimes come other times not. We had the impression that was otherwise affirmed by out assistant/interpreter, Monica, that associates of the foundation were so deeply involved and slightly exasperated that however helpful they are, in fact they don’t want anybody to chip into the process they started with the youngsters who contacted them. It was confusing in a sense that it planted the feeling in us that it would be impossible to start our project in May and find an enthusiastic group to work with. Luckily it happened other way. On the one hand we were almost resigned to failure, but at the same time, in the first days started to fluster, which fortunately disappeared later.

At the selection process, although our intention was to choose children ourselves, we weren’t aiming to find children for specific characters but for teamwork and doing so we had to take many aspects into consideration: their free time, their age (we wanted children of similar age), their enthusiasm; so it was important for us that they could spend a lot of time with us and that they were willing to spend that time with us. Despite all this, or especially because of this, we managed to select exactly the ones who wanted to participate indeed.

After visiting the foundation we went to the high school called Institute Pla d’en Boet. Everything was speeding up here. Delícia – member of the Can Xalant staff – arranged us a meeting with a local teacher, Elvira Carrió who otherwise organised drama classes at school. She was very nice and helpful, moreover, extremely constructive. After we had briefly explained her what we wanted, she agreed and encouraged to set off and visit some classes to tell them our ideas personally. We were all surprised, Delícia rushed back to pile up the posters and Katalin tried to remember as much of her Spanish as she could and we entered classes where we met kind and helpful teenagers.

Finding the right children for our project was absolutely successful and we reached our goal to find the right number of motivated young teenagers for the shootings of the episode. At the same time, we should be aware of how much the children and different factors of the selection process affected the “research” and modified even the project. As we had created our project plan without knowing anything about the place, it was predictable that local characteristics would modify and direct the work.

13 May, Sunday. I realised that the plan we had handed in was matching only with the core structure of the actual project that could be carried out. Without local knowledge, in our plan we were referring to the fact that as the town was growing, there were new quarters emerging where inhabitants moved in and with the help of our film we wanted to study the needs of these people.

However, in lack of local knowledge it was not clear for us that the newest quarters of the town were far from Can Xalant, so we were developing the project in a different environment that we first decided to focus on.

When in Budapest, we started planning our stay, we asked Oriol (collaborate of Idensitat) to get in touch with local organisations, schools so as to help our search for children interested in our project. Our motivation was avoiding a situation when nobody would have been interested in our project. Oriol might have been surprised as that could have been part of the fieldwork that we ourselves find the right group of children. As time was short, we could not chose this. We were very lucky to work with the IES Plat d’en Boet and to have the drama teacher’s help as well as to find such enthusiastic kids.

The children attended the school close to Can Xalant; they came from the neighbouring districts which were mainly expanding in the past. Katalin suggested that the place of the story should be the whole town. This was appropriate as – opposite what we presumed - new quarters were integrated to the “body” of the town, were connected to the centre, so the town and its services and urban areas formed a homogeneous unit. Also not all kids were living in the same area.

As Katalin claimed even from the viewpoint of the shooting, the town is not too big, can be easily walked round as children tend to often do it. So – even we did not look deeply into te life of any neighbourhood – when searching for places for the film, talking about the city each part of it was included and discussed.

girls and boys

Girls and Boys. The soap opera syllabus intensified the traditionally girlish trend; this was problematic only when it seemed that we were “losing” the male members of the group. Originally there were fewer boys at the selection process, and on the first day of shooting out of 6 only 2 boys came. Therefore is seemed possible that we were running out of boys as they were less interested in the story or maybe it was due to the dominance of the girls. During the selection most girls who got into the group were friends in their lives as well, as it seemed some of them were very close friends. This fact restricted a bit the activity of other members. Moreover the group followed those 1-2 opinion leaders.