Did you know? Oscar 2019 winner Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi is of Hungarian origins

Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi and her husband, Jimmy Chin, won the Oscar for best documentary film, “Free Solo”. In fact, Elizabeth’s father, professor Miklos A. Vasarhelyi, is Hungarian while her mother, Marina Vasarhelyi, is Chinese from Hongkong.

The award-winning documentary profiles Alex Honnold and his free solo climb of El Capitan in June 2017. A free solo climb means that the climber performs alone and without using any ropes, harnesses or other protective equipment, and relies entirely on his or her abilities instead.

Though Elizabeth’s father is Hungarian,

she grew up in New York,

graduated from The Brearley School, and she holds a Bachelor’s degree in Comparative Literature from Princeton University. Before she started her own filmography, she worked as an assistant to director Mike Nichols on the Golden Globe-winning film “Closer”.

Her first film, “A Normal Life”, won Best Documentary at the Tribeca Film Festival in 2003. Later, she won numerous awards with her films, for example, in 2013, she finished a documentary about the annual Grand Magaal pilgrimage of one million Sufi Muslims to the holy Senegalese city of Touba. She directed the highest grossing independent documentary film of 2015, “Meru”, about conquering the 6,660-metre-high Meru Peak in the Himalayas.

About “Free Solo”, she and her spouse, Jimmy Chin, said that they were haunted by the possibility that

their presence might put rock climber Alex Honnold in more danger every time they turned on the cameras.