- Occupation
Director - Country
Hungary
Trencsényi Klára
Bird's Way
"Bird's Way" is a creative documentary, a magic realistic tale that guides us to a remote Old Believers‘ village in the Danube Delta, Romania - following the route of migrant birds. The protagonist of the film is the Old Believer community itself. Once fugitives, excommunicated by the Russian Orthodox Church in 1666, Old Believers found refuge in the wild Delta where they could preserve old rituals, Russian customs and their sacred language. Today no one is left to read the sacred texts, not a priests to lead religious life. Their last 'reader', Artiom, tells us the destiny of Old Believers as laid out in the Book...
3 Weddings: Elena & Leo
In 1956, Elena was only four when her parents left Hungary to build a new life in Argentina. She became an immigrant for the second time when she returned to Hungary in 1975. She was scrutinized by the communist authorities as a potential spy and had to fight prejudice to be accepted and feel like a Hungarian again. In 2008 she fell in love with Leo, a 35-year-old guy from Cuba. They got married in Budapest, but bureaucracy and prejudice threaten their relationship and may turn them both into migrants … again. Through the love story of Elena and Leo we learn more about migrant illusions, nostalgia and homesickness.This short documentary is part of the "3 Weddings" series (3 esküvő, 3 x 26 min).
"Bird's Way" is a creative documentary, a magic realistic tale that guides us to a remote Old Believers‘ village in the Danube Delta, Romania - following the route of migrant birds. The protagonist of the film is the Old Believer community itself. Once fugitives, excommunicated by the Russian Orthodox Church in 1666, Old Believers found refuge in the wild Delta where they could preserve old rituals, Russian customs and their sacred language. Today no one is left to read the sacred texts, not a priests to lead religious life. Their last 'reader', Artiom, tells us the destiny of Old Believers as laid out in the Book...
3 Weddings: Elena & Leo
In 1956, Elena was only four when her parents left Hungary to build a new life in Argentina. She became an immigrant for the second time when she returned to Hungary in 1975. She was scrutinized by the communist authorities as a potential spy and had to fight prejudice to be accepted and feel like a Hungarian again. In 2008 she fell in love with Leo, a 35-year-old guy from Cuba. They got married in Budapest, but bureaucracy and prejudice threaten their relationship and may turn them both into migrants … again. Through the love story of Elena and Leo we learn more about migrant illusions, nostalgia and homesickness.This short documentary is part of the "3 Weddings" series (3 esküvő, 3 x 26 min).
Mirrorland
Our creative documentary follows the self-recognition and the first encounters with the outside world of four children: Alicia is seven years old, lives in traditionally Catholic, yet lately rather Bohemian Spain, while Jake lives in London, he is five years old and there is no secret about his family - it is almost trendy to have two mothers in London…The situation of the Hungarian protagonists is completely different though: children born in lesbian relationship are younger, their parents and families face the challenges of being "the first, the pioneers" in a post communist society lacking understanding and openness toward them.There are 9 lesbian couples currently living in Hungary who decided to have a baby despite prejudices, open discrimination and predominantly conservative attitudes towards family roles in Hungary. One of the young mothers who gave birth to Lujzi (15 months), Eszter, is a photographer, who decided to launch a mailing list for these couples: she wants to help the others, and let information flow among them – knowing that all of them have just been over the difficult phase of getting pregnant, giving birth in an indifferent, sometimes even intolerant atmosphere. They are united by the anxious experience of being the 'first', but also by simply being young mothers of small children aged 1 to 3. They try to rediscover a new rhythm of life: spending time at home with their babies and in the same time trying to keep up with their work and their previous life (often as activist lesbians). Eszter’s other aim when she set up their informal network was to convince the girls to participate in her art project: every year she gets the nine families together in a studio and takes one picture of each family, a beautiful, nicely lit, 'family photo’ like in « good old times ». But unlike those traditional family portraits hung up in cosy living rooms for all to see, these photographs cannot be seen by us, the outsiders: we don't have access to these wonderful art objects because families are afraid. They agreed to participate in this photo project only by making Eszter promise that these photos will be private for the following fifteen-twenty years. These brave mothers try to be just mothers, though they are at all times aware that (through this simple, natural gesture) they make history. One of the mothers put it straight-forwardly: ‘I am happy to tell everyone that I am a lesbian, that I live in a lesbian partnership. I have been working as an advocate of lesbians all my life. But I cannot decide in the name of my daughter that she should become famous for being 'The Lesbian Child’.Mirrorland has a very sensitive starting point: it aims at capturing a universal topic: how little children first get out of the "caul", how they accommodate with other people for the first time after being nurtured by their parents during the first months/years of their life. Going to nursery or kindergarten they come to face other children and adults on regular basis, people coming from different circumstances, with different family models. We, as adults, would give anything if only we could recall those first moments of encounter with society at large, well-buried in our subconsciousness. It is a daunting moment for children and parents alike.But due to the fact that - at least in Hungary - lesbian mothers are scared of the aggressive response of the majority society, the filmmakers have to find a way to tell this story and in the same time protect their protagonists.
Our creative documentary follows the self-recognition and the first encounters with the outside world of four children: Alicia is seven years old, lives in traditionally Catholic, yet lately rather Bohemian Spain, while Jake lives in London, he is five years old and there is no secret about his family - it is almost trendy to have two mothers in London…The situation of the Hungarian protagonists is completely different though: children born in lesbian relationship are younger, their parents and families face the challenges of being "the first, the pioneers" in a post communist society lacking understanding and openness toward them.There are 9 lesbian couples currently living in Hungary who decided to have a baby despite prejudices, open discrimination and predominantly conservative attitudes towards family roles in Hungary. One of the young mothers who gave birth to Lujzi (15 months), Eszter, is a photographer, who decided to launch a mailing list for these couples: she wants to help the others, and let information flow among them – knowing that all of them have just been over the difficult phase of getting pregnant, giving birth in an indifferent, sometimes even intolerant atmosphere. They are united by the anxious experience of being the 'first', but also by simply being young mothers of small children aged 1 to 3. They try to rediscover a new rhythm of life: spending time at home with their babies and in the same time trying to keep up with their work and their previous life (often as activist lesbians). Eszter’s other aim when she set up their informal network was to convince the girls to participate in her art project: every year she gets the nine families together in a studio and takes one picture of each family, a beautiful, nicely lit, 'family photo’ like in « good old times ». But unlike those traditional family portraits hung up in cosy living rooms for all to see, these photographs cannot be seen by us, the outsiders: we don't have access to these wonderful art objects because families are afraid. They agreed to participate in this photo project only by making Eszter promise that these photos will be private for the following fifteen-twenty years. These brave mothers try to be just mothers, though they are at all times aware that (through this simple, natural gesture) they make history. One of the mothers put it straight-forwardly: ‘I am happy to tell everyone that I am a lesbian, that I live in a lesbian partnership. I have been working as an advocate of lesbians all my life. But I cannot decide in the name of my daughter that she should become famous for being 'The Lesbian Child’.Mirrorland has a very sensitive starting point: it aims at capturing a universal topic: how little children first get out of the "caul", how they accommodate with other people for the first time after being nurtured by their parents during the first months/years of their life. Going to nursery or kindergarten they come to face other children and adults on regular basis, people coming from different circumstances, with different family models. We, as adults, would give anything if only we could recall those first moments of encounter with society at large, well-buried in our subconsciousness. It is a daunting moment for children and parents alike.But due to the fact that - at least in Hungary - lesbian mothers are scared of the aggressive response of the majority society, the filmmakers have to find a way to tell this story and in the same time protect their protagonists.
Klára Trencsényi was born in 1975 in Budapest. She has been making documentaries since 2004; as cinematographer she worked on The Angelmakers (2005), The Secret Years (2009), and directed several documentaries including A Chance (2007), 3 Weddings - Elena and Leo (2009), Birds Way (2009) and Corvin Variations (2011). She is committed to creative documentary cinema, and organized the first Hungarian creative documentary workshop in Budapest in 2010. She is presently working on two feature length creative documentaries as cinematographer and director.
Director:
Mirrorland – creative documentary, Hungary-England-Spain, in development
Corvin Variations 39’ – creative documentary, Hungary, 2011
Birds Way 56’– creative documentary, Libra Film, Romania, 2009, Director and D.o.p.
3Weddings – Elena&Leo 27’ – documentary, Campfilm, Hungary, 2009, Dir. and D.o.p.,
A Chance (Az esély) 56’ – social documentary, Titania Master Pro, Hungary, 2007, Dir. And D.o.p.
Director of Photography:
The Gunyas’ – experimental documentary, Dir. Astrid Bussink, Holland, 2011.
Vivien – social documentary, Dir. Eszter Hajdú, Hungary, 2011.
Concealed Years – Lesbian history in Hungary during communism – feature documentary, Dir. Mária Takacs, Hungary 2009.
The Csangos – documentary, Dir. Ibolya Fekete, Hungary, 2006
Budapest to Gettysburg – documentary, Dir. Jake Boritt, U.S., 2006.
“Tabló” – fiction, Dir. Gábor Dettre Hungary, Second Unit D.o.p. 2006.
The Angelmakers – documentary, Dir. Astrid Bussink, Holland-UK 2005.
“Interrupting the dream” - portrayal film of a Hungarian Neonazi leader, Dir.: Mária Takács, Hungary, 2005. Not released due to legal issues.
Interviewer:
“First Class – Second Class” - Hungarian Black Box Documentary Studio, Documentary film on discrimination against Roma pupils in Hungary, 1999-2000.
Birds Way (2009) - 56' creative documentary (Award: Best Romanian Documentary, AstraFilm Festival Sibiu 2009)