István Szabó Defends Past as Informant
The Guardian reports that Hungarian director István Szabó, 67, whose Mephisto won the 1981 best foreign-language film Academy Award, has been exposed "as a former informant for the communist authorities in 1950s Hungary. His activities coincided with the Soviet crackdown that followed the 1956 revolution and occurred when he was a student at the Budapest Academy of Film."
Szabó defended himself from the accusations, saying that "the state security job was the bravest and most daring endeavor of my life because we saved one of our classmates after the revolution of 1956 from exposure and certain hanging."
Besides Mephisto, which stars Klaus Maria Brandauer as an actor who sells out to the Nazis, Szabó’s films include Colonel Redl (1985), also with Brandauer and a best foreign-language film Academy Award nominee; the anti-Communist family saga Sunshine (above, 1999), starring Ralph Fiennes, Jennifer Ehle, and Rachel Weisz; and the fluffy Annette Bening vehicle Being Julia (2004).
According to the IMDb, the director is currently working on Rokonok, the tragicomic story of a young man (Sándor Csányi of Kontroll) whose life is changed after he becomes the attorney general in a small Hungarian town. The film is scheduled to be released later this year.
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