Review Article: “Documenting Immigrants, Boarding Houses and Ethnographers” Burdosház Amerikából – Balogh Balázs néprajzkutató nyomában ('A Boarding House from America - in the Footsteps of Ethnographer Balázs Balogh'). Directed by Dezső Zsigmond, produced by Dunatáj Alapítvány, Camera: Arthur Bálint, 2015, 50:39 minutes.

Abstract

This review article offers a critique of Boarding House, a Hungarian ethnographically-based documentary film about a formerly Hungarian mining-settlement in Vintondale, Pennsylvania. In the film two researchers from Hungary introduce this settlement via interviews, old photographs and stories about a general store that in addition functioned as a boarding house for miners. Also featured in the film is the acquisition process of some thousand items of this store by the Open Air Museum of Szentendre, Hungary, in order to replicate the boarding house in the museum and thus illustrate some aspects of Hungarian-American immigrant life in this United States coal-region during the 1920s and 1930s.