Un Passaporte Hungaro (2000)

Run Time - 74 min.  |   Countries - Belgium, Belarus, Brazil, France  |   MPAA Rating - NR
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Synopsis by Ryan Shriver

Paris-based documentarian Sandra Kogut decided to try to obtain a Hungarian passport and her year-long effort to accomplish this task turned into a lesson in insane bureaucracy and not-so-dormant racism in her 2002 cinematic diary, Un Passaporte Hungaro. In 1937, Kogut's Jewish grandparents decided to flee Hungary for sanctuary in Brazil in anticipation of the Nazi invasion that would soon follow. Her grandparents encountered no resistance to their plan to leave the nation, due to a Hungarian official's efforts to not hinder "dirty Jews" from leaving his nation. Upon arriving in Brazil, however, her grandparents found that the South American nation was preventing Jews from entering its boundaries and subsequently sent many ill-fated Hungarian Jews back to their port of origin. Kogut's grandparents were allowed to enter after successfully bribing immigration officials. As she makes her journey from Paris to Brazil to Hungary to document her family's history in order to obtain her passport, Kogutexperiences the same -- although less overt -- kinds of racism regarding her Jewish heritage that her predecessors had to endure some 66 years earlier.