HISTORY IS NEVER FINISHED Trauma, Revolution and Reconciliation in Peter Hegedus’ Lili
Lili (2018), the latest documentary by writer/director Peter Hegedus, begins not with new or archival footage, but with historical re-enactment. In grainy, flickering black-and-white, the film lingers on the face of a small blonde girl, eight years old, clutching her mother’s hand as her father pushes a wheelbarrow.1 This image will recur again and again throughout the documentary. Glimpses of the family culminate in a longer, more complex scene, one that asks the viewer to interpret all that has come before through the lens of trauma. The small child is Lili Gárdonyi; it is 1944, and close to 200 Jewish labourers are about to be slaughtered at a train station.
‘The massacre has haunted me all my life,’ says Lili, now in her eighties, in voiceover. It’s a strong opening scene, one that becomes something of a red herring throughout the film and, eventually, a dissonant note in an otherwise-intimate production. And it vastly complicates my reaction to the work in ways that are hard for me to be objective about.
I am the daughter of a Hungarian refugee. This, and the fact that I write about motherhood and intergenerational trauma, is why Metro approached me to review Lili, a film about Hungarian maternal trauma and intergenerational suffering. And, in some ways, this documentary was tailor-made for me; though it’s fairly robust, it is rare to see the Hungarian-Australian community represented anywhere in media.
Though some Hungarians immigrated immediately following World War II, a large contingent arrived in 1956 and 1957, after the failure of the Hungarian Revolution of 1956.2 Beginning as a student protest, the uprising snowballed when the Állam Védelmi Hatóság (ÁVH), the Hungarian secret police, fired on the demonstrators and ordinary Hungarians poured into Budapest to fight alongside the students.
Some, like Lili, threw themselves into their new roles as freedom fighters. Upon returning with her daughter Edie to Budapest, where the uprising’s sixtieth anniversary is being commemorated, she recounts her contribution to the revolution: collecting the dead bodies of students for containment in makeshift coffins, to clear the way for protesters and to preserve the dead for later burial. The uprising ended brutally. Soviet tanks rolled in to the country, and Soviet soldiers killed 2500 protesters. At among them Lili, whose friend’s husband, a member of the ÁVH, had tipped her off to her impending arrest and probable execution.
