Hungary's film blacklist: Orbán's propaganda machine
The National Film Institute under Viktor Orbán operated a silent cultural purge: grants denied without explanation, contracts revoked, independent filmmakers forced to work unpaid or leave the country altogether. The mechanism is documented — and a landslide election defeat isn't enough to undo fifteen years of damage.
At a Glance
Hungary’s National Film Institute (NFI), the government body controlling the country’s film financing, systematically funneled its budget — then estimated at around $60 million annually — toward patriotic dramas and ideologically aligned projects, while marginalizing works critical of the ruling Fidesz party, Hungary’s dominant nationalist-populist movement.
Several independent filmmakers had grants revoked without explanation; others never applied, knowing their projects would be rejected. The result was a structural self-censorship that industry professionals describe as Orbán’s most lasting cultural legacy.
Péter Magyar’s landslide victory on April 12, 2026 — ending sixteen years of Orbán’s rule — opens a window for reform. Dismantling a system of cultural control built over a decade and a half, however, is not a matter of executive order.
This image is used for illustrative purposes only.
A gleaming new studio built to control who gets to film
In January 2025, Viktor Orbán — Hungary’s prime minister since 2010 and the European Union’s most persistent institutional disruptor — inaugurated the NFI’s new studio complex in Fót, on the outskirts of Budapest, with a remark designed to sound magnanimous: “Even filmmakers who don’t vote for us profit from the government’s investment in this industry.”
The response from Hungary’s film community was immediate. In an open letter published that same month, several professional organizations flatly rejected the framing: independent filmmaking in Hungary was not a choice, they wrote, but “a forced path, a penny-pinching, minimal-budget enterprise” [translated from French] where crews routinely worked without pay.
The paradox is striking. Hungary has never been more in demand internationally. The country’s annual film production volume has surpassed $1 billion — a fivefold increase since 2018 — driven by a 30% cash rebate that has attracted The Brutalist, Dune, Poor Things and Maria. Adrien Brody collected his Oscar for a film shot almost entirely in Budapest. Dávid Jancsó, the film’s editor and himself nominated for an Academy Award for that work, has put it plainly: the government could have chosen to fund award-winning films or propaganda films. Hungary chose propaganda.
The László Nemes paradox: Cannes 2026 and the system’s blind spot
The contradiction reaches its sharpest point at this year’s Cannes Film Festival. On May 17, László Nemes — the Budapest-born, Oscar-winning director of Son of Saul — premiered Moulin in the Official Competition of the 79th Cannes Film Festival. The film, a French-language historical drama following Jean Moulin’s final days under Nazi-occupied France, was shot on 35mm film and post-produced entirely at NFI Filmlab, the Budapest technical facility — a division of the same National Film Institute — that also handled post-production on The Brutalist and Poor Things.
In other words: the very technical infrastructure of the NFI — the institution that, under Orbán, excluded independent critical voices from its financing — served as the backbone for a prestige Cannes competition title made by a Hungarian director working outside the Hungarian funding system, for a French producer, on a French story, using Hungarian tax credits.
The NFI’s laboratory and cash rebate were available to the world’s best directors. Its development grants were not.
Nemes is not known to have applied for NFI production funding for this project. The structural irony is self-evident: the institution excelled at selling Hungary’s infrastructure to foreign productions while quietly rationing its creative financing along political lines.
The silent mechanics of exclusion
No official blacklist exists. That is precisely what makes the mechanism effective and difficult to challenge in court — and what makes it so reminiscent of another era.
The parallel is not accidental. In the early 1950s, the Hollywood blacklist — a coordinated system of professional exclusion targeting filmmakers suspected of Communist sympathies — operated not through written decrees but through the tacit understanding of who would and would not be hired. Careers were ended not by law but by a nod. Hungary under Orbán developed what functioned as a 21st-century equivalent: not a list, but a grant committee whose decisions required no justification.
Director Gábor Reisz had two screenplays rejected by the NFI before deciding to stop applying altogether. For his film Explanation for Everything (2023) — a portrait of Hungary’s social fractures that went on to win a prize at the San Sebastián International Film Festival — he assembled a team of nearly twenty collaborators, most of whom worked for free, and shot the entire film over three frantic weeks.
Andor Berényi, 29, experienced something starker: an outright grant reversal. A production award of some €400,000 (approximately $433,000) for his debut feature was revoked eight months after it had been approved — with no explanation given. Two other first-time directors had their grants cancelled at the same time. The apparent common thread: all three projects depicted Hungary in an unflattering light. The NFI did not respond to questions about its decisions.
Independent director Bálint Szimler didn’t even try. He knew the subject of his film — a critique of Hungary’s authoritarian education system — would not pass the NFI’s criteria. His movie, Lesson Learned, became one of Hungary’s most-watched domestic releases of the year. It was made on a shoestring, with a crew that largely donated its labor.
What this system produced was, in effect, upstream deterrence: if enough filmmakers anticipate rejection and self-censor in advance, the refusal never needs to be issued. The propaganda doesn’t need to be mandated — it would impose itself by default, for lack of a funded alternative.
The defense, and its limits
Csaba Káel, then-director of the National Film Institute, rejected accusations of political bias. He pointed to several NFI-backed productions tackling sensitive subjects — including White Plastic Sky, an eco-dystopian animated feature, and Without Air, a debut by Romanian-born director Katalin Moldovai exploring homophobia within the Hungarian education system. In at least one separate instance, Káel stated publicly that a project had been rejected on technical grounds — specifically, that it was a remake of a Czech film — an explanation the affected filmmakers dismissed as unconvincing. Káel’s mandate as government film commissioner was legally tied to that of the prime minister; it expired automatically when Orbán left office, and he remained in a caretaker capacity until the Magyar government was sworn in on May 9.
These examples confirm that the exclusion was not total or mechanical. They do not resolve the pattern. The NFI’s largest single grant in 2024 went to a drama recreating a Hungarian military operation in Kabul, produced in cooperation with the country’s armed forces. And Gone Running, the most commercially successful independent Hungarian film of that year, received no state support whatsoever. Both facts can be true simultaneously. They are not equivalent.
What Orbán’s defeat reveals — and what it doesn’t
On April 12, 2026, Péter Magyar’s Tisza party — a center-right pro-EU movement founded only two years earlier — won nearly 70% of seats in Hungary’s parliament, collecting 141 of 199 seats with 53.6% of the vote. Viktor Orbán, who had won four consecutive supermajorities, conceded the same evening. Prime Minister Magyar, sworn in on May 9, has pledged wholesale reforms of the NFI, with the stated goal of restoring “the predictability and international competitiveness of the Hungarian film industry.”
A change in leadership at the top of an institution is not, by itself, cultural restoration. What Hungary’s film industry is inheriting is not simply a biased grant committee — it is a generation of filmmakers shaped by the knowledge that certain stories could not be told with public money, that certain truths had a price tag, and that silence was the rational professional choice.
The bottom line
Hungary now operates two parallel film industries: a thriving international service sector that builds sets for Hollywood and hosts post-production for Cannes competition titles, and a domestic auteur cinema in a state of managed survival. Fixing the funding infrastructure is achievable by decree. Rebuilding the trust of creators who learned, over fifteen years, that the state was not a patron but a censor — that is a different undertaking entirely.
The real measure of change will not come from the next NFI director’s inaugural speech. It will come from the films made five years from now by those who stayed, and from the stories they finally feel safe enough to tell.
Sources: The World / PRX · Film New Europe · European Film Academy · Screen Daily · Al Jazeera · CBS News · Chatham House