Synopsis

László Ede Hugyecz (1893-1958) -- later L.E. Hudec -- was a Hungarian architect who fled the vicissitudes of Europe in the early 20th century, taking with him the style and knowledge of European building design and construction. His work – spanning nearly 30 years of Shanghai’s economic and cultural ‘glory days’ – includes the first skyscraper from London to Tokyo.

In 2008 new archive materials – including original letters, photos and 16mm film – have surfaced from his descendants in Hungary and the U.S. These archives paint a complex and thinking man living at the crossroads between Europe and China. The new archive materials reveal the man behind the architect that even his children barely knew.

Through their testimony, through his incredible film footage, and through our research of his footsteps, his story will give a extraordinary inside look at the first rush of Europeans to China, of its first modernization (skyscrapers!), and of the turmoil of the 20th century. A perspective all the more fascinating that, today, once again, China looks like the new El Dorado.

Visual Approach/Creative Style

Dr. Eszter Jánossy is 65 years old, and lives in Budapest. She’s outside unpacking wooden crates on the two-columned, old-style veranda of her family’s old villa. She’s pulling out dozens of dusty and moldy letters, one of them has a Chinese stamp on it dated “Shanghai,December, 1918.”

“This is it!” says Eszter in an excited tone. “My mother told me that he escaped from the Russian POW camp in 1918 and reached Shanghai later that year.” Afterwards she reaches back into the crate and pulls out more letters and an album. She dusts off about two centimeters of 50 year-old dust and reads “L.E. Hudec Architecture – this was also Uncle László’s.”

“Uncle László – also known as László Ede Hugyecz – was Eszter’s uncle. Ten thousand kilometers from Budapest, Shanghailanders are just beginning to commemorate the 50^th anniversary of his death: indeed, it’s his name that people in Shanghai associate the most with Hungary, a country they know little to nothing about. Meanwhile, in his native Hungary and Europe in general, few people have even heard of László Hugyecz. And still, globalization is more than twenty years old -- and so are the intense, and complex, European-Chinese relations.

The new-old archive material about Hugyecz/Hudec includes some 250 letters written by him - about his architecture, but mainly his life. He writes about everything, from his early days as a student in Budapest, his time in the military, as a POW, his early days in Shanghai in that city’s glory days, his struggle to build up a profession as a foreigner in the Far East, as well as the political climate and persecution from 1937 until after WWII. After he left Hungary to go to war in 1914, he visited Hungary a dozen times, but could never move back, and he missed his family more than anything. He kept tight ties with them through the mail, and wrote to Eszter’s mother, Jolán, on almost a weekly basis.

Hudec also sent hundreds of photos – some of which he made into personal postcards, which included his own comments and writings on the back. He was a skillful photographer, documenting his work in Shanghai, as well as his trips in China and elsewhere (Japan, Europe, and the US). His pictures sent to his family are a type of ‘blog’ in today’s terminology – they take you on a visual tour of what he saw. For example: when he arrived to China, he sent general pictures of Shanghai to his family, so they would understand what a different world he was living in. One postcard includes three Chinese pagodas and he writes on the back “Here their churches don’t ring church bells. Here they beat drums and use clatters and rattles.”

But, most important for our film, he was also a prolific filmmaker. He filmed (on 16mm) many of his trips and architectural projects from 1927 until about 1940. Over 10 hours of film include Shanghai, New York, Budapest and various European capitals. There is ample footage of his family, his children – the material forms almost a core document, visually, of his era.

Finally, the newly revealed family archives, now collected and being researched under the “Hudec Heritage Project,” include beautiful archive pictures from the late 19^thcentury, from Hudec’s family background living in the ethnically mixed Austro-Hungarian Empire. Until now, if people knew about L.E. Hudec, they knew about his architecture: about the Park Hotel, the Grand Theatre, Dr. Woo’s House. But these materials show who László Ede Hugyecz was, personally, in his own words, his own photos, and his own films. And this has to be thoroughly researched for a successful film.