It is with a very, very sad heart that I let you know that Nina Kiraly (Dubrovskaya) passed away. We still can't process she is no longer with us. She was 77, way too young for us to let her go so soon. We are heartbroken but will keep her spirit alive and let it shine through. We will hold a memorial for her at the Hungarian National Theater in Budapest on August 24th, 2018.
A documentary was made of this year's MITEM festival. Editor-director: Laura Bánfalvi, reporter-narrator: Dénes Farkas, editor-in-chief: Gábor Szabó.
Since its premiere at the National Theatre in Budapest last autumn, Részegek (The Drunks), directed by Victor Ryzhakov, has been bringing down the house. It is shortlisted for the summer 2017 POSzT (National Theatre Festival in Pécs), too, where the previous season’s most highly esteemed Hungarian productions are presented each year.
Edit Kulcsár
It was a long while before when I last felt as deliberated, elevated and (let me say) “happy” as during the last year festival in Kisvárda. I enjoyed the productions staged by Hungarian theatres outside Hungary, and I was impressed that any drama workshop seemed to be consistent to their special approaches. Self-identification is the term that I would describe them with after the professional discussions which proved to be great opportunities to talk sincerely with the companies and the creators about the professional ups and downs.
Nina Király
It is a well-known fact that in a theatre everything happens hic et nunc and in spite of the development of the contemporary media the recordings cannot really substitute the excitement, the sadness or the admiration that can be the results of direct encounters between the actors and the audiences.
It does not happen very often that a minority Hungarian artist should stage a Serbian national classic and that this production should be presented at such an international theatre festival as MITEM, which is already in its third year now. I am especially happy about this since one of the central ideas of our festival from the very beginning is that the question of national identity must also be embraced by theatrical practice. Szcenárium devoted a two-day professional programme to this topic in 2014.
Sebastian-Vlad Popa
A festival organiser, even if he would love to behave like an anthology editor, cannot really behave like that. This latter one may freely rely on his intuitions while picking the poems when it is hard to define his object. On the contrary, a festival organiser has to fit the complicated and difficult complexity of things into his own “anthology”, during which act his attention is mostly focused on the risk factors of the given historical moment.
Béatrice Picon-Vallin
It requires great courage to raise the issue of national theatres at a festival, which is such an important, moreover, a very central issue in Europe. This is a very complex subject: the task that a national theatre aims and undertakes varies from country to country on one hand, because of the differences in their historical background, but on the other hand, because of the actual context. There is no regulation or recipe to provide guidance for such a situation.
Ágnes Pálfi – Zsolt Szász
While this year’s MITEM was underway, one could see en route the Nemzeti (National) day by day how the stone carvers built the pedestal of the equestrian statue of Gyula Andrássy, the first minister of foreign affairs during the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy, on the concrete core which had been lying there lonely and undisturbed for months.
