An Educational Corpus Based Exploration of Contemporary Hungarian Cinema: Lessons of the 2021 Hungarian University Film Awards

Abstract

This paper explores the origins, pedagogical aims and framework of the Hungarian University Film Award (HUFA) incorporating the personal experience of its author who participated in the coordination of various stages of the initiative. It claims that the initiative created a unique learning environment—an educational corpus comprising of six films from 2019 competing for the awards—and describes the methods and conceptual angles used in class discussions. The first part of the article outlines the interpretive framework offered for students to better grasp the general aesthetic and generic patterns at work in the corpus, including the emergence of a medium concept film in Hungarian film culture. The second part introduces another framework that helped students to contextualize the corpus by organizing films into two groups based on festival appearances and international visibility. The final part of the paper focuses on interpretations proposed by students, the ways they used the analytical methods of integration and differentiation while addressing the HUFA-corpus. This includes reconstructing key arguments as to how in-class debates mapped up, compared, and criticised the manifold strategies films employ to raise awareness towards traumatic experience. The pedagogical benefits of the initiative were most apparent in this stage, where students were expected to consider both individual films and an overarching trauma-discourse.