ARTE Re: Bureaucracy as a weapon – Pastor Iványi and Hungarian politics

ARTE, 2017, 30 min.

The film looks at poverty in Hungary and at the Hungarian Evangelical Fellowship, a small Methodist community dedicated to looking after the poor. This small church serves as an example of the way in which the Hungarian government is trying to torpedo such efforts by means of laws and bureaucratic obstacles. There is a clear system to the government’s tactics. Ever since a new church law revoked the Fellowship’s status as an accepted church in 2012, Pastor Iványi, the president of this church and an open critic of the Orban government, has been struggling to secure the survival of his numerous charitable institutions. The film follows Pastor Iványi during his work with his charges, homeless people, senior citizens and Roma children. And it also describes his daily battle against a Kafkaesque bureaucracy.