Jön az öcsém is the last film Kertész shot in Hungary. Mihály Kertész (1886-1962) then pursued his career in Europe, and later in the United States using the pseudonym of Michael Curtiz. His inspiration for this film was a poem by Antal Farkas (1875-1940) that was published in the Népszava newspaper on 26 March 1919. This text praised the courage of the Hungarian communist leader Béla Kun. In November 1918, the Austro-Hungarian Empire capitulated. Béla Kun, a young communist agitator educated in the USSR founded the Hungarian Communist Party before being thrown into prison by the Prime Minister Mihály Karolyi.

Budapest was occupied by the Romanian army at the time. Kun, who continued to lead the PC from his prison cell, managed to convince Karolyi&rsquos provisional government to allow him to try to recover Hungarian territory. He was appointed Minister of Foreign Affairs in March 1919 and set up an army (red, of course), which recovered the occupied territories. He also thwarted a nationalist revolt in Budapest and purged the social-democrat government. Terror was installed and lasted until August 1919.

At the moment Béla Kun took up power, the filmmaker Mihály Kertész was a member of the Hungarian arts commission and of the actors&rsquo examination jury. He made Jön az öcsém, then supervised a reportage on the May Day parade. He suddenly left Hungary in May 1919, due to difficult political circumstances. Socialist realism was probably not to his taste. Kertész was considered in fact as the unrivalled master of the &ldquobourgeois&rdquo style, which was condemned to disappear.

The future Curtiz was a child of European cinema: he graduated from the School of Dramatic Arts in 1906. He made his first film in 1912. During a stay in Denmark, he worked as assistant director then actor (in Atlantis in 1913) at Nordisk Films. He was mobilised during the First World War then participated in the dismantling of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. In May 1919, Curtiz fled to Austria then left Europe in 1926 for Hollywood, where he directed Casablanca (1942) and Mildred Pierce (1945), among other films.

Jön az öcsém ends with these contradictory lines &ldquoHasten to return from your Siberia now red, Hasten to return to your Siberia now red... Hasten, my brother, hasten!&rdquo. A visionary poem, in a way, since in the months following the making of the film, the dictatorship of the proletariat was overthrown by a military putsch. Béla Kun fled to Austria, later returning to the USSR where he became an influential party member.

On 1 August 1919, the army confiscated all newsreels and propaganda films shot under Béla Kun. This film was rediscovered in the archives of the Ministry of the Interior. The original is a nitrate tinted positive print. A colour intermediate negative has been printed from this positive. Subsequently, a colour copy has attempted to reproduce the original tints. The restoration was carried out in 1999.

The original music for this film was composed by Marc Perrone in 2008.