17-19 Cockspur St, London SW1Y 5BL
This event marks the 70th anniversary of the Hungarian Revolution with a screening of Robert Vas’ documentary portrait My Homeland, produced for BBC Television and first broadcast in November 1976.
One of the finest filmmakers working in Britain in the 1960s and 1970s, Vas made this powerful and moving portrait of Hungary and its people from exile, having fled the country after Soviet tanks rolled into Budapest. Combining archive film and photographs of the violence of the events of 1956 with a rich selection of poetry, read by Michael Bryant and Judi Dench, Vas reflects on the role of the poet in Hungarian history and most especially in the failed revolutions of 1848 and 1956.
This special screening will be introduced by Dr Eleni Liarou (Birkbeck, University of London) and followed by a discussion with Professor James Jordan (University of Southampton), Hungarian-born poet, writer and academic, György Gömöri and moderated by the Director of Liszt Institute London, Botond Zákonyi.
The film is 70 minutes long and will be shown in English, without subtitles.
Programme:
6.00 pm: Doors
6.30 pm: Film screening
7.45 pm: Panel discussion
Panelists:
Dr Eleni Liarou is Senior Lecturer in Film and Television History at Birkbeck, University of London. She is currently completing a book about European emigres in postwar British Television documentary, to be published by Bloomsbury/BFI.
Professor James Jordan is the Director of the Parkes Institute for the study of Jewish/non-Jewish Relations and Professor of Holocaust Studies at the University of Southampton. He has written widely on the representation of the Holocaust in film, radio and television.
György Gömöri (b. 1934, Budapest) is a Hungarian-English literary historian, poet, translator, and university professor.
György Gömöri studied Hungarian and Polish at Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest. In 1956 he became a member of the Petőfi Circle. In October-November 1956 he was an editor of Egyetemi Ifjúság. He emigrated to the UK after the 1956 Revolution and later studied at Oxford University. Between 1963-1965 he was a professor of Polish and Hungarian at the University of California, Berkeley, then worked as a researcher at Harvard University. Between 1965 - 1969 he taught Polish and Hungarian literature at the Institute for East European Studies at the University of Birmingham, England, and from 1969 to 2001 at Cambridge University. He has been a member of the editorial board of the journal World Literature Today since 1969, a Fellow of Darwin College Cambridge since 1970 and an emeritus Fellow since 2001. A member of the editorial board of the Viennese journal Bécsi Napló since 1994, he has been chairman of the Board of Trustees of the Rotary Prize for Literature since 2008.
He co-edited collections of poems by László Nagy, Attila József, Miklós Radnóti and György Petri, and an anthology of modern Hungarian poets in English with George Szirtes. He has translated into Hungarian poems by Zbigniew Herbert, Czesław Miłosz and Clive Wilmer, among others.
Chaired by Botond Zákonyi, Director of Liszt Institute London.
Co-organised by John Wyver, writer and producer of arts documentaries and performance, and Professor of the Arts on Screen, University of Westminster. His most recent publication is Magic Rays of Light: The Early Years of Television in Britain (Bloomsbury/BFI, 2026).