HIVATAL

Passing through the foreigners’ registration office’s swinging door, we enter into a pitiless bureaucratic machine where each client is nothing more than a file. New case worker Anna daily meets desperate migrants caught between the right to stay and deportation. Many of them worry about their residence status even after decades of living in Hungary. This mixture of personal proximity and the constraint of having to make unpopular decisions makes Anna feel increasingly uncomfortable. The pressure the young woman is under mounts as empathy is not included in her job description.

In BUREAU, Director Viktor Oszkár Nagy, who intensively explored the topic of escape and migration already in his documentary CAUGHT BETWEEN TWO WORLDS (2011), scrutinises not only the situation in Hungary, but also common migration policy clichés. This documentary style television film does not separate between ‘good’ and ‘evil’; rather, it attempts to furnish the cold walls of a government office with a human face – by way of protagonists (migrants re-enacting their own cases) and amateur actors who, in largely improvised dialogues, feel intuitively affected by the oppressive, interrogation-like situation. KG