Julia Deak was born in Budapest. She holds a degree in Hungarian Literature and is a qualified journalist. After winning two journalism writing competitions, she joined Hungarian State Television, where, for seven years, she was responsible for the making of cultural documentary films. She has been awarded prizes for her work there. During that period she also wrote screenplays for her own films and television programs.
Later, she pursued her career as an independent, free-lance writer. She has had two prose volumes published by a respected publisher, and her novellas and book reviews have appeared in a well-known literary monthly.
In recent years Julia has devoted herself to making short films. She writes these films herself, and is the director, cinematographer, producer and editor rolled into one. She has learned the techniques of digital post-production in order to be able, with the minimum of help from others, to realise fully her vision of how she would like her films to look and sound. Her short film, Noises won a place at the New Media Film Festival in Los Angeles, and also featured in the exhibition Art on the Wall, organised as part of the Festival. In addition to its involvement in these events, Noises was included in Poetry in Motion , a framework programme within the Regensburg International Short Film Week 2015.
These events were covered widely in the Hungarian press, and many online magazines also reported on Julia's success abroad as a short film maker.
When I first set out to find the place in Budapest depicted in a photo, I had no idea of making a film. The photo in question is the well-known picture taken in 1944 in which women are being herded the length of the city, their hands up, towards a fate now all too familiar. I spent a long time searching for the picture’s location in the old ghetto, but with no success. In the end, I realised that the photographer had captured the procession after it had come out from behind the walls of the ghetto, when the women were having to march with their hands raised in front of strangers. I also saw that a similar photograph I had found, which shows the women from behind, had been taken at the same time. The photographer had turned around as the line of women went by and, standing on the same spot, had pressed the shutter a second time.
Seventy years on, and the street has barely changed. The houses look almost identical; people go about their business. A line of parked cars now stands in the square that the women marched across.
It was experiencing this indifference, the indifference of ordinary workaday life, which steps over and across everything, that gave birth to my film.