80 Angry Journalists

The film is an inside account of the struggle for Index — one of Hungary’s first, and at the same time most widely read and influential online newspapers — at the height of its escalating crisis. When the opaque environment of the owners began to intensify pressure to transform editorial practice, one of the paper’s war correspondents picked up a camera and started documenting everything — thus becoming the director of this film.

The first phase of the crisis ended with the departure of the entire newsroom, made up of more than eighty — often elite — journalists. Both a moral gesture and a practical step, it threw them all into uncertainty, but also opened new opportunities. The film raises questions about journalistic freedom and its institutional and community foundations, for which authoritarian governance is a frontline stress test. Next in line is society as a whole.