A film by Anders Ostergaard and Erzsebet Racz / An Icarus Films Release
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No one was more surprised than 40-year-old academic economist Miklos Nemeth when he was named the Prime Minister of Hungary. The year was 1989 and communism was on the brink of collapse and Nemeth, an outsider with few friends in the Party, was suddenly responsible for the seemingly impossible task of saving the country from bankruptcy.
1989: A STATESMAN OPENS UP takes viewers behind the scenes of Nemeth's administration during the most critical year in recent European history. As Nemeth travels to Berlin, Bonn, Bucharest and Moscow, meeting with his increasingly worried fellow Warsaw Pact leaders and German Chancellor Helmut Kohl, the film reveals the role that developments in Hungary played in the fall of the Berlin Wall and subsequent collapse of Communism throughout Eastern Europe.
Convinced that free elections were coming and that the Communist Party would lose them, Nemeth seeks to avoid a repeat of the events of 1956, when Hungarians' rebellion against Soviet domination ended with tanks in the streets.
Within the space of a few months, he seeks the blessing of Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, sidelines hardliners, and navigates the crisis that erupts within the Party when the body of Prime Minister Imre Nagy, one of the heroes of the 1956 Hungarian Revolution, is discovered in a Budapest field.
Finally, when Nemeth allows tens of thousands of East Germans to flee to the West across the Hungarian border with Austria, he makes the historic events that would soon grip Berlin inevitable.
1989: A STATESMAN OPENS UP uses transcripts of high-level meetings read by actors, contemporary interviews with Nemeth, and extensive archival footage to create a sense of immediacy and urgency in telling this pivotal, remarkable story.
