By Connie Field (September 13, 2026)
In April, I watched Viktor Orbán ousted in Hungary by a landslide. I was amazed and ecstatic. This was personal for me. I had traveled there with my Hungarian husband every year since 1990. Over three decades we watched the country change through the eyes of people we loved — through the euphoria of the early post-Communist years and, eventually, through its disturbing turn to autocracy. We watched avidly last year as Péter Magyar, the man who would go on to oust Orbán, traveled all around Hungary drawing bigger and bigger crowds. But I always assumed Orbán would find a way to change the election laws yet again so he’d win no matter how strong the opposition was. He didn’t. Magyar won by a landslide.
A glorious moment for democracy, and an important moment for us. This tiny country has had an outsized influence on the world, and especially on ours. Trump has taken his authoritarian playbook directly from Orbán — the attacks on the courts, the takeover of education, the gerrymandering of political districts, the takeover of the press. I’ve now watched that playbook run in two countries, a decade apart. But from Hungary, I’ve also now seen something I never expected to see: the playbook for how to defeat an autocrat.
I made a film about Orbán’s Hungary called Democracy Noir, released in 2024. It began, though I didn’t know it yet, in Liberty Square in Budapest in 2014, watching Orbán unveil a memorial that tried to obscure Hungary’s role in the deportation of its own Jewish citizens. Standing there among the protesters, I understood something: this wasn’t only an attack on laws and institutions. It was an attempt to control memory itself. In that crowd I met a young nurse named Niko, barely twenty, who became one of the three women at the center of my film — alongside Tímea Szabó, a fearless opposition politician fighting from inside a parliament built to make her irrelevant, and Babett Oroszi, a journalist trying to report facts in a media landscape engineered to bury them. Together they let me follow the fight on three fronts: the street, the chamber, the press.
Tímea Szabó blows a whistle in the face of Viktor Orbán in the Hungarian Parliament in a scene from ‘Democracy Noir.’
For years I tried to get the film funded, and almost no one cared. I kept shooting anyway. I had the good fortune of a Danish producer, Sigrid Dyekjaer, becoming interested in the project — and it was through her that the film was finally able to get made. Then Trump happened, and perhaps was destined to happen again, and the pattern I’d been watching in Budapest started showing up move for move in Washington. Suddenly the film I’d been circling for a decade had an urgent second subject. Democracy Noir stopped being just a portrait of Hungary and became a mirror of my own country.
Nurse Niko Antal and ‘Democracy Noir’ director Connie Field in Budapest. Photo by Judit Kalmar.
We premiered it at CPH:DOX in Copenhagen in 2024, in competition for the festival’s F:ACT Award, and released it that year as a cautionary tale for the world. I’d hoped the film might warn people about what Trump would do before our 2024 election. But Hungary is a small country most Americans know nothing about, and it didn’t resonate the way I’d hoped — until we screened it on January 20, 2025, Inauguration Day. That’s when people’s eyes went wide with recognition: this is exactly what Trump is doing.
The film ended on a hard truth: Orbán was still in power, and there was no tidy victory lap. I believed then, and still believe, that resistance is worth practicing even when you’re losing — the crowds that kept showing up for teachers’ strikes and opposition rallies in Budapest were proof the fight hadn’t gone out of the country. But I never imagined I’d get the chance to change that ending.
This past April, Hungarians went to the polls and voted Orbán out. Not narrowly — decisively. Péter Magyar, a former Fidesz insider turned opposition leader, led his party, Tisza, to a landslide victory. Orbán, who had ruled for sixteen years and seemed to most observers essentially unremovable, conceded that same night. Turnout hit 80 percent, the highest in Hungarian history, with young voters backing Magyar at a staggering 90 percent. After sixteen years of eroding every institution meant to check him, Orbán left office because ordinary Hungarians voted him out.
I did not see this coming. When I finished the film, I believed I was documenting a system so thoroughly captured — the courts, the media, the electoral map itself — that it might have no exit. But years of accumulated exhaustion with corruption and a crumbling economy, scandals that stripped away Fidesz‘s moral pretensions, a genuinely new party to put a vote behind, and, in the end, millions of ordinary Hungarians — nurses, teachers, shopkeepers, students — decided that sixteen years was enough. Niko, Tímea, and Babett had spent a decade organizing, reporting, and protesting for exactly this outcome, often with no evidence it would ever come. It came anyway.
I couldn’t leave the film where I’d left it. This victory was too important not to include. So I went back to Hungary to film, then restructured the whole thing into chapters, so that what had been one continuous descent could hold this turn as well. The first two chapters remain what they always were: the taking of power, and the long grinding fight to survive under and against it. But now there’s a third chapter — the one I was most excited to make — where the people who spent decades organizing, marching, and reporting under an autocrat actually win. The film has a new title to match: Democracy Noir: A New Dawn.
I’m adding this chapter because I need it as much as any American audience does. It’s been easy, these past couple of years, to feel that once a country starts down this road there’s no coming back up it. Hungary just proved that isn’t true. It took sixteen years, three brave women I’m proud to call friends, and millions of people who refused to stop showing up.
That’s the film I want to send back out into the world now — not a warning that ends in the dark, but in a rising light. Democracy Noir: A New Dawn premieres at the Grand Lake Theater on September 16, in a benefit for groups on the ground working to get the vote out this November — Indivisible, Seed the Vote, Movement Voter Project, and Flip the Vote. Come help me support them. Tickets and information here.
I made the original film because I watched a democracy die up close, to people I love, and I refused to watch it happen again without a fight. I’m bringing it back now, with its new ending, because I watched that same democracy come back to life — and I refuse to let Americans go on believing that isn’t possible for us too.
To learn more about Democracy Now: A New Dawn, about upcoming screenings and how you can help get the movie seen, visit the Clarity Films website.
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Connie Field is an Academy Award nominated, and Emmy Award winning, director who has made a number of high profile documentaries that have been shown all over the world. Before getting involved in film she worked as an organizer in many social and human rights organizations where she established her commitment to progressive social change which she has carried into her film career. Many of her films focus on hidden histories, stories that had not been told before which should be an important part of our collective memories. Her most recently finished films are The Whistleblower of My Lai and Oliver Tambo. Some of her previous work includes Al Helm: Martin Luther King in Palestine, about an African American gospel choir touring Palestine in a Palestinian play about Martin Luther King Jr; the seven-part series Have You Heard From Johannesburg, on the global movement that ended Apartheid in South Africa, which aired on PBS and the BBC in January 2012; Freedom on My Mind a history of the civil rights movement in Mississippi; the feminist classic The Life and Times of Rosie the Riveter and ¡Salud! on Cuba’s role in the struggle for global health equity. She has won numerous awards including Academy Award nominations, the Sundance Grand Jury Prize, a primetime Emmy Award, British Academy Award Nominee, Best Series, and Best Feature Documentary from numerous festivals, as well as having her films listed as the Best Doc of the Year or One of the Ten Best Films of the Year by a number of film critics. Her work has been broadcast in over 30 countries including Japan, Brazil, South Africa, Britain, Australia, Denmark, Germany, France, Spain, England, and in the US. She is a recipient of the John Grierson Award as most outstanding social documentarian, and a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship and is a member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.
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