Puskás Puzzle

But then again, why not? After all, it's hardly exaggerating to call Ferenc Puskás the most famous of all Hungarians. I and many other Hungarians have frequently found his is the name that travelled furthest. I had to hear it with my own ears before I believed it. If anyone had asked me to name the "most famous Hungarian", I would have answered Bartók, Kodály, Franz Liszt or, if pushed, John von Neumann, Ferenczi or Georg Lukács.

Perhaps Houdini or Béla Lugosi, to include mass culture. But there is nowhere, from Salonika to the Outer Hebrides, from Campobasso to Warsaw, where Puskás's name does not come up once someone asks "And where are you from?" Older people can even rattle off the name of the entire Golden Team. One has to bow before the weight of the evidence.
Understatement is typical not only of the title but the film as a whole. The definition that the film gives—"Puskás is the most widely recognised Hungarian word"—is even better than calling him the most famous Hungarian.

In one interview he has given, the director related that one possible title that was considered was "The Real Puskás", but he rejected that. He felt he had no right to assert that what he was showing was the "real" Puskás.

The restrained, unassuming director in question is Tamás Almási. Unassuming or not, you might think he has something to be immodest about.

The most highly regarded Hungarian non-fiction director, he has a background working as a cinematographer in feature films. Born in 1948, it was not until the Nineties that his career really took off, but since then he has established himself as one of Hungary's best-known documentary makers, shooting close to 30 featurelength films since the early Eighties.

He has won many awards, and his films are seen by hundreds of thousands of viewers. This is despite the paucity of venues and audiences for documentary films in Hungary.

A television screening in itself is a huge stroke of luck, and documentaries on DVD are as rare as hen's teeth, but screenings in actual cinemas are nowadays the stuff of dreams. Since the few years that followed Hungary's transition to democracy, when documentary films exploring previously taboo subjects and history's blank spots drew big audiences (see my review in HQ 169), Almási's achievement has been unparalleled."

More from the source: The Hungarian Quarterly