THE CITIZEN

As an African migrant in Budapest, Wilson Ugabe leads a schizophrenic existence between the indignities of everyday racism and being honoured as employee of the month. During preparations for his citizenship test with helpful Maria, the 56-year-old develops an appreciation for the music of Béla Bartók and the company of his married tutor, who is also his age. Their budding relationship is put to the test though by the presence of Shirin, a young Iranian woman, who has been living at Wilson’s place illegally ever since she ran away pregnant from a refugee camp. The coexistence of these three individuals becomes increasingly impacted by questions of trust, tolerance and the willingness to help – and the limits of all three of the above ... With THE CITIZEN, Roland Vranik returns to the goEast Competition, devoting himself here to the most pressing issues of the present, after exploring dystopian visions of the future in TRANSMISSION. The political is mirrored in the private in his film, which works as a genre picture of Hungarian society and an unusual love story at the same time. He counters the anonymous nature of the “refugee wave” by presenting two individual faces and stories and casting genuine amateur talents in both roles. In a humorous, nuanced, highly topical fashion, Vranik paints a portrait of a divided society, again and again conjuring up humanist symbols from the country’s past as part of an enlightened Europe, not without the occasional ironic refraction.