Hurry Up And Wait

In June 2021, the Hungarian ruling party Fidesz under Viktor Orbán passed a law banning the portrayal of homosexuality to minors. This represents an attempt to make queerness invisible in Hungarian public life. At the same time, the German ARD miniseries Eldorado KaDeWe — Jetzt ist unsere Zeit was being shot in Budapest. It depicts, among other things, the queer life of the Berlin subculture around 1920.

While experiencing an almost surreal simultaneity of a light-hearted film bubble and a backward-looking socio-political moment, the two leading actresses Lia von Blarer and Valerie Stoll set out to counter the political state of affairs with an artistic and activist voice.

In their book Hurry Up And Wait, the two actresses juxtapose queer fiction with queer reality through photographs and texts. Their analog photographs taken during the shooting of the series allow us to glimpse the exuberant and restless world of filmmaking, while people from the Hungarian queer community provide insights into their everyday lives by means of poems, short stories, as well as political speeches. They tell us about their attempts to regain freedoms and agency that have been taken away from them by the current government.