Orsolya Benkő

Orsolya was born in Budapest, Hungary, in 1980. After graduating at the Faculty of English Literature and Cinema Aesthetics at Eötvös Loránd University of Sciences in Budapest, she was the author of several essays on cinema aesthetics and scriptwriting as well as of various film-related articles and reviews. During her studies in Cultural Mediation as well as Cinema and Audiovisual at the Sorbonne Nouvelle Paris 3, she did a traineeship as a production and distribution assistant for The Coproduction Office in Paris. After her return to Hungary, she contributed to the organisation of several film festivals and joined MEDIA Desk Hungary. She started collaborating as a script consultant in 2007 with the production company Merkelfilm in Budapest. From 2008 on she cooperated on more and more various projects as a script consultant with young filmmakers, such as Czech director and screenwriter Marek Dobes and Hungarian director Csaba Bollók among others. intention: When it comes to author-story editor relationship, a third factor should also be taken into consideration: that of the spectator. Not in the sense of his preferences or taste but on a more elemental level: how he is affected. Especially when we consider today’s viewer who is invaded by images but often not confronted to any content behind them. What visual stories are supposed to convey is the human content behind the image, a certain model for life or at least a relation to it: to the basics of human life which are the same in different cultural circumstances. Therefore I’m not only interested in how “well” a story is told, rather in “what” is told, that is, what it suggests to audiences. Stories in the form of movies have an inevitable impact on our lives; our feelings and relation to the world are refined by them. My method focuses on the author’s personal experience or need to write his/her story, and aims to avoid slipping into a “movie for movie’s sake”-type of filmmaking. The author’s own relation to the story is the link to the spectator, a way to allow his/her experience to become that of the audience. Applying the premise “only what is personal can be universal”, I intend to contribute to a project in bringing forth and deepen this personal relation to the theme, and make it as accessible for the audience as possible.