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SUNSHINE
NOMINATED FOR AWARDS ON DEMOCRACY AND HUMAN RIGHTS
"Politics
has made a mess of our lives." These words sum up the three-hour-long
saga Sunshine, a film about five generations
of a Jewish family in Hungary named Sonnenschein (German for
"sunshine") over the past one hundred or so years that has
some parallels with Alex Haley’s seven-generation Roots
(1976), though the principal male in the last three generations
(Ignatz, Adam, and Ivan) is a sort of Hungarian Jewish Forrest
Gump (played by Ralph Fiennes). The last of the line provides
numerous voiceovers throughout the film to provide continuity.
The movie is directed and cowritten by István Szabó. When
the movie begins, the patriarch of a prosperous family, who
has developed a moneymaking tonic from local herbs in the
days of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy, dies due to an explosion
in the distillery. When the twentieth century dawns, desires
for upward mobility prompt the younger Sonnenscheins to change
their German surname to the Hungarian name Sors due to pressures
for assimilation. However, two Sonnenschein sons gradually
diverge in matters of politics; Gustave (played by James Frain)
is eventually active in the short-lived Communist rule of
Béla Kun in 1919, while Ignatz remains loyal to the monarchy
in which he served as judge. When the monarchists (allied
with Romania) oust the Communists in 1919, Gustave flees to
exile in Paris, but Ignatz remains. However, no monarch is
restored; Horty de Nagybány sets up a dictatorship instead.
Ignatz’s son Adam becomes a champion in the sport of fencing,
and converts to Roman Catholicism to advance his athletic
career, which eventually results in a Gold Medal at the 1936
Olympics in Berlin. Fearing Hitler, Horty later decides to
appease the Nazis by rounding up many Jews, but there are
exemptions at first, and the Sonnenschein/Sors family remains
free. When the exemptions are abolished, the family is placed
in a Budapest ghetto. Later, father Adam and son Ivan are
among several thousand Jews taken to a concentration camp;
upon arrival, the Hungarian guards torture the father in the
eyes of the son and the rest of the Jews. Within
five days, Russians liberate Hungary in 1944.
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By 1948, Communist rule is established, and Ivan is inducted
into the police force with the mission of rooting out the
"fascist bastards," thanks to the intervention of his elderly
uncle Gustave, who returned from Paris to become a Communist
official. In due course the next scapegoat of the Communists
becomes the Jews, and Ivan is placed in charge of a portion
of the purge. Since he has no stomach for the purge, he
is active in the Hungarian revolt of 1956, only to be incarcerated
for three years after Russian tanks end the uprising. At
the conclusion of the film the Hungarian people end forty-five
years of Communist rule, a development in which the surviving
Ivan Sors plays a not inconsiderable role. He then changes
his name back to Sonnenschein. Although
the story is not a biography of an actual family, the rather
simplified historical events are based on fact. One message
in the film is that undemocratic regimes start out full
of promise but always degenerate into despotism; when the
film ends, true democracy hopefully arrives, though of course
in 1994 former Communists, calling themselves the Socialist
Party, won a majority in parliament. Unlike the Italian
Jews of Life Is Beautiful
(1998) or the Polish Jews of Jakob
the Liar (1999), the experience of the Hungarian
Jews in Sunshine appears closer to reality, depicting a
family that tried to show proper loyalty to Hungary first
by practicing ethnic coexistence, later by following an
assimilationist path, and finally by showing ethnic pride
in a cultural pluralist mode. Thus, a second message that
becomes clear is that Hitler’s rejection of the policy of
ethnic assimilation made inevitable the later assertion
of cultural plural-ism, with worldwide consequences. For
both insights, the film has been nominated for a Political
Film Society award as the best film promoting the values
of democracy and human rights in the year 2000. MH
SCOTT
CROSSON CONTRIBUTES SYLLABUS
Scott Crosson of the University
of Oregon has made a contribution to the Syllabus
Series of the Political Film Society, the fourteenth
in the series. For a copy of his syllabus or any of the
other thirteen, which are available for $1 each, send a
check to "Political Film Society" at P.O. Box 461267, Hollywood,
CA 90046.
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