East Punk Memories

“Communist drug/I don’t need you!”. Over twenty years ago, Lucile Chaufour filmed Hungarian teenagers in the punk movement. At that time, an Iroquois haircut or holey jeans would lead to tangles with the police. Back in Budapest, the musician filmmaker traced and interviewed some of them individually, stimulating their anamnesis with photos or films. “I don’t recognise myself…”: the sentence that opens many of these conversations lends a certain ambivalence to the relationship that these quadragenarians have with a past that seems much further back than the 1980s. “It was… another planet”, concludes one of them. This is borne out by astonishing views of the tourist park where the Communist statues now stand assembled. In the widening gulf between the evocation of a rebel youth (forcibly anti-Communist) and, in the second part of the film, reflections on post-1989, the dissonant words of the former punks reflect a political awareness in shreds. Fear of extremist nationalism, fear of globalisation: the disorientation of these new Europeans is clearly a little like our own…