The documentary “A Hungarian Passport” is exactly as exciting and intriguing as its title. In other words, sometimes perhaps you can judge a book by its cover, or in this case, a film by its title.
“A Hungarian Passport” is about the bureaucratic journey undertaken by filmmaker Sandra Kogut over the course of more than two years to secure a passport from Hungary.
The documentary will be screened Wednesday, April 27, at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, as part of the Jewish Film Festival.
Kogut is a Brazilian Jew living in Paris, whose grandfather was Hungarian. Got that?
With the prospect of Hungary joining the European Union, Kogut decides a European passport would serve her well.
What starts as a simple request at the Hungarian consulate in Paris leads to
a bureaucratic nightmare worthy of Kafka, as Kogut untangles the complicated story of her grandparents’ journey in 1937 from Hungary through Italy to Brazil.
Her grandmother, Mathilde Lajta, was aware of the impending war. Hitler, already in power by 1933, was spreading his might and although she didn’t “know,” she “suspected” that “those who didn’t want to see never saw.” She was pregnant and did not want to raise a child in Europe. It was the impetus for her and her husband’s escape (and ultimate survival).
Two generations later, her granddaughter’s application for a European passport and an attempt to reclaim the one stripped from her grandfather makes the journey come full circle.
Kogut’s film is nicely shot. She has made about half a dozen movies, but this is her feature documentary debut. She interweaves footage from her visits to various consulates with visits to relatives and archival shots of trains and ocean crossings.
Kogut tries in vain to show the parallels of going from France to Hungary to Brazil and back again in search of documents that may or may not be needed to complete the passport process. Along the way, she struggles with her identity and what it means to even have a passport. She gleans information about her family through stories of her grandmother and her relatives, Holocaust survivors who stayed behind.
The film really comes alive when her grandmother reminisces about the struggle to get out of Europe, the harrowing near miss of not being able to disembark in Recife. (There was a secret Brazilian document in place at the time not allowing Jews to obtain visas.) Nearly as poignant are her memories of being a second-class citizen and Jewish refugee during the ’40s through to present-day Brazil.
But therein lies the problem of the film: There is no heart, no urgency, no life-and-death struggle to obtaining a Hungarian passport circa 2002, as opposed to 70 years before. There is only a rather cynical reason based in, if not greed, at least base commercialism, for her to get a passport.
Even her grandmother notes early on, “For you [Sandra] it would be the first step toward European citizenship … so you’re a millionaire in time.”
The many voices in “Passport” can be confusing at first. For example, is the officious guy speaking French with a Hungarian accent a bureaucrat or the consul general himself? Who is the young Brazilian guy with skeptical questions about the process? Her husband? Her brother? A fellow passport seeker?
I enjoyed “Hungarian Passport” much more viewing it a second time through, once I could identify the myriad characters she introduces.
At several points, folks ask Kogut why she wants or needs a Hungarian passport. She is either unwilling or unable to give an answer — which ultimately becomes the question facing the viewer: Why do you want or need to see this film?
“A Hungarian Passport” shows 7:30 p.m. Wednesday, April 27, at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, 701 Mission St., S.F. Tickets and information: (415) 978-2787.