16-06-2011

Agnes Havas Appointed to Lead Hungarian National Film Fund

By FNE Staff

    BUDAPEST: The new Hungarian Film Fund has named producer Agnes Havas as the fund’s director. The fund was created to support the production of Hungarian films by Andrew G. Vajna, the government-appointed film commissioner. Havas was instrumental in building the concept of the new fund, which is owned by the Hungarian state, and is capitalized with 20 million forints (cca. 75,000 EUR) with 1.65 billion forints (cca. 6 million EUR) allocated by the country’s central budget for its first year operations.

    The fund was officially established by the Hungarian government at the beginning of June.

    MTI (www.mti.hu), the national press news agency announced that Vajna could not be appointed to lead the Fund as he will remain in his post as film commissioner until the end of 2011, and he cannot hold two government positions at the same time. Havas stated that it is a great honour for her to temporarily lead the Fund through the end of 2011, she will work as Vajna’s deputy beginning in 2012.

    Vajna stated that the first calls for grants for film production could appear as early as this summer. However, there is still no news about financing other film industry activities such as art cinemas, distribution, publishing, trainings etc, as the Film Fund will likely only focus on production. The Hungarian film industry has been in serious turmoil since the beginning of 2010 when the Hungarian Motion Picture Foundation became insolvent and was unable to pay the contracted grants to the producers, distributors, exhibitors, and others. There is still no information on the payment of last year’s debts.

    Published in Hungary
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