Not even the COVID-19 pandemic could stop the Hungarian film industry

Just like almost all countries in the world, Hungary also faced serious restrictive measures due to the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic. Following the lockdown in the middle of March 2020, however, the Hungarian film studios were able to quickly get back to production in early summer by rapidly solving the challenges of precautionary measures and obtaining exempts for movie casts and crews so that the production of grand international titles could continue.

According to Hollywood Reporter, Csaba Káel, the Government Commissioner for the Development of the Hungarian Motion Picture Industry, said that, although many international productions were halted or deserted, by early summer, almost all the productions that were in progress could be continued. He also added that they finished a total of 20 productions last year.

Although the most important recordings of Denis Villeneuve’s sci-fi epic Dune were finished back in July 2019, they were able to revisit the Origo Studios in Budapest last summer in order to shoot some additional footage for the upcoming movie. Other productions that were able to continue their work include Amazon Prime’s drama, Birds of Paradise, which finished shooting in Hungary in August, Netflix’s Terra Vision about the story behind Google Earth, the set of which was built in the NFI Mafilm Studio complex in Fót, near Budapest. Nicolas Cage’s new movie, The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent, is also being shot in Hungary.

Korda Studios, one of the most successful movie studios in Hungary, provided the location for Showtime’s new live-action series inspired by the popular Halo video games, but not just the big blockbuster productions were welcome. Smaller independent features were also able to continue or finish their work safely, observing measures intended to mitigate the spreading of the coronavirus.

The reason why Hungary’s movie industry was able to get up so quickly after getting hit by a freight train has several factors to it. Firstly, Hungary and the film studios around the country acted fast and rapidly introduced the necessary protective measures to be able to safely continue their work.

Hungary was among the first to introduce regular mandatory testing, tiered systems isolating groups of crew members in order to limit the viral spread, and other similar protocols, which soon became the standard across the global film industry.

Also, as film production makes up about 0.15% of the total Hungarian GDP, the government steadily helped Hungarian studios where it could, so when the European Union introduced a ban on non-EU citizens entering Europe, the Hungarian government passed exempts for Hollywood crews and casts.