A numbers game: Three Thousand Numbered Pieces

DOCUFICTION / After an unofficial five-year filmmaking ban, Hungary's Ádám Császi continues to oppose the authoritarian Orbán regime. «What you call realism is just you exploiting our misery. And what you call absurd is just plain racism», says a male member of an all-Roma theatrical troupe, confronting the white director of a play titled Gypsy Hungarian. To which a female thespian jumps in with, «And you call this «deconstruction.» Do you know what you’re deconstructing? Your own racism. And a deconstructive racist is still a racist.» (Ouch.) In other words, this collaborative work, based on the actors’ real-life experiences (which in today’s Orbán-land includes homelessness, juvenile delinquency, heroin addiction, rape and all manner of abuse), is a good-faith effort that has clearly gone off the rails. Strangely, something that tends to happen not under (non-collaborative, bad faith) authoritarian regimes but only in the wokest of white liberal spaces. Ay, there’s the rub! Fortunately (and unfortunately), Ádám Császi, the visionary director behind Three Thousand Numbered Pieces (and the next Ruben Östlund by my lights), knows a thing or two about working in both.

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