István Szabó

István Szabó
István Szabó, 2004
Born	(1938-02-18) 18 February 1938 (age 78) Budapest, Hungary
Occupation	Film director
Years active	1959–present

István Szabó (Hungarian: [ˈsɒboː ˈiʃtvaːn]; born February 18, 1938) is a Hungarian film director, screenwriter, and opera director.

Szabó is the most internationally famous Hungarian filmmaker since the late 1960s. Working in the tradition of European auteurism, he has made films that represent many of the political and psychological conflicts of Central Europe’s recent history, as well as of his own personal history. He made his first short film in 1959 as a student at the Hungarian Academy of Theatrical and Cinematic Arts, and his first feature film in 1964.

He achieved his greatest international success with Mephisto (1981), which won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film. Since then, most of Szabó's films have been international co-productions filmed in a variety of languages and European locations. He has continued to make some films in Hungarian, however, and even in his international co-productions, he often films in Hungary and uses Hungarian talent. Szabó became involved in a national controversy in 2006 when the Hungarian newspaper Life and Literature revealed that he had been an informant of the Communist regime’s secret police.

Born in Budapest, Szabó is the son of Mária (née Vita) and István Szabó, the latter of whom was a doctor from a long line of doctors. Szabó came from a family of Jews who had converted to Catholicism, but were considered Jews by the Arrow Cross Party (Hungarian Nazis). They were forced to separate and hide in Budapest sometime between October 1944, when Nazi Germany occupied Hungary and installed the Arrow Cross in power, and February 1945, when the Soviets defeated the German Army in Budapest.