Incubator (2010)

• 73%
• 2010
• Documentary
• Réka Pigniczky

A documentary film about the transformation of an exile community nearly twenty years after the end of the Cold War. This film is about growing up in an exile community in the West, developing a double-identity, and becoming a hyphenated-somebody. It's about learning to have two homelands at the same time - one in real life, and the other imagined and maintained by parents who were forced to flee. It is about a first generation of children whose parents lived abroad longer than they originally expected to, and who never really assimilated. The story is told through an unlikely, albeit dramatic reunion - one which involves a Hungarian rock opera performed in the Sierra Nevada mountains of California by a cast of 40-something Hungarian-Americans. The original cast, including the film's director, meet in the exact same spot they performed Stephen, the king 25 years ago, as Hungarian scouts during summer camp in 1984. That summer the Soviets still had tanks stationed in Hungary, and the country was isolated behind the Iron Curtain. Many of these scouts had never been to Hungary, where their parents were born. The reunion of this original cast, now living all over the world including Budapest, makes for an emotional and hilarious portrait of one of many 'incubators' operating in the U.S. and Europe over the years. They're meeting not only to reminisce, but also to figure out just who they've become, twenty years after the 'Motherland' was liberated.