The cinematic team of Swiss director Mr Men Lareida and his Hungarian wife, screenwriter Anna Maros, has documented the hell on earth of Hungarian prostitutes working in Zurich.

The film, Viktoria – A Tale of Grace and Greed, has been presented both at Sehenswert [Worth Seeing], a Budapest film festival of new Swiss, German, and Austrian films, and in local movie theaters across Budapest.

The Swiss film foundation, Swiss Films, and the City of Zurich chipped in CHF 1.3 million (about USD 1.36 million) to cover the cost of the Swiss and Hungarian actors and amateurs in this “tale of the underworld” of prostitution. The filmmakers bid for funding from the Hungarian National Film Foundation, too, but failed to receive any.

Lareida, who began his career as a journalist and cultural organizer, became known for a documentary called Live Fast, Die Young he made in 2005 about Swiss Formula One driver Jo Siffert, who had burned to death in his racing car in 1971.

In this film Lareida follows a Roma girl who comes from deep poverty, from her life in Budapest’s impoverished District Eight to the streets of Zurich [District Eight was immortalized in 2004 in Nyócker – (The District!), a 90-minute animated cartoon by Áron Gauder].

The filmmakers are determined to present the facts of a shocking and disturbing social phenomenon but not to inspire pity.

“People treated as victims over the years tend to lose their dignity. My friends and I managed to spend hours arguing over television shows rather than taking a look at the Roma women of [red-light] Sihlquai Street. The drama was playing out before our eyes but no one paid any attention to those chilling stories,” says scriptwriter Anna Maros. She said she hoped the film would become a cautionary tale, making its way also to the villages of eastern and northeastern Hungary on free, itinerant film shows. Most of these women take the road to prostitution in hopes of a better life from those parts of Hungary.

Maros has been living in Zurich for twenty years and regularly commutes between Hungary and Switzerland on the Wiener Walzer express train. It was on that train that she first met women traveling to Switzerland to become sex-workers. Five years of research and conversations with nearly one hundred women preceded the rolling of her camera.

Surveys tell us that the number of women coming primarily from eastern and northeastern Hungary and Budapest to offer sexual services in Switzerland began climbing in 2006-2007. Most of the women are Roma, uneducated, and come from patriarchal families. Often they may already have two or three children. Most have work permits for ninety days a year.

If they present the right papers and make their way through the Swiss administrative procedure, they are granted permission to work the streets legally. Since a growing number of women have been choosing this lifestyle, the Swiss police try to have introductory meetings with them to filter out those women who are being forced into prostitution against their will. Hungarian pimps, living and operating along Zurich’s Langstrasse and Sihlquai Street, terrorize the women who pay them as much as CHF 1600 per person. They should be able to rent an apartment for that kind of money, but instead, two or three share a single room.

The women who do not have pimps are exploited by female capos, who milk them for as much as CHF 100 a day.

Note that the map of street prostitution in Zurich has been reshaped since fall 2013. It has moved further away from the city center, to Depotweg in District Nine where Verrichtungsboxes, [transaction booths], equipped with alarm buttons and washbasins, and offering free access to condoms, have been set up. Activists from a welfare organization called Flora Dora are also active around there as is an emergency gynecological clinic; and language services are also offered to them, where interested women can study German.

The women, whose knowledge of German is generally limited to the parrot-like repetition of “oral sex 50 francs, intercourse 80, and complete services 100 francs,” suffer the most humiliation not from their Johns but from the money-hungry pimps and madams.

Back to the film. Thanks to realistic performances given by actors Zsolt Nagy and Simon Szabó, the Swiss police nearly clamped down on the filmmakers during shooting. But when they learned that the group was making a movie, they congratulated the director on the choice of actors.

Viktoria, the eponymous lead character of the film is performed by Franciska Farkas, a sensuously beautiful model and amateur actress. She regularly performs with Független Színház and the Karaván Társulat (Caravan Ensemble). In the film Viktoria first accepts the rules of the game but eventually refuses to be humiliated.

Her room-mate, a non-Roma woman, called Blondie who is on the streets to make the money to get her son back, helps to get Viktoria angry enough to fight the pimps taking their money. The fight is brutal, and Blondie loses out. Viktoria manages to escape and eventually returns to the place she originally escaped from – Budapest’s depressing District Eight.

Source: HVG

Translated by Budapest Telegraph