1 Representing the Past and the Meaning of Home in Péter Forgács’s Private Hungary Ruth Balint Published in Laura Rascarolli, Gwenda Young and Barry Monahan (eds) Amateur Filmmaking: The Home Movie, the Archive, the Web, Bloomsbury, 2014, 193-206. Since the 1980s, Hungarian filmmaker Péter Forgács has been working with old home movies and amateur films, using them as the foundation upon which to create his extraordinary narratives of twentieth-century European, mostly Hungarian, history. 1 His films provide unique and telling insight into the experiences of ordinary individuals whose lives intersected with, and were shaped by, the historical events of the twentieth century, and they make a significant intervention in contemporary historical debates around issues of representation and memory. Yet, to date, there have been few to engage with Forgács’s work from outside a film studies perspective, and little attention has been paid to it by historians. This chapter is an attempt to redress this gap. As a historian, I am primarily interested in the ways in which Forgács’s signature work, Private Hungary (known in Hungarian as Privát Magyarország), offers both a challenge to the official memory of the past in twentieth-century Hungary and a creative response to the debate around the limits of historical representation. Further, as this chapter will discuss, Forgács’s use of home movies interrogates our most fundamental conceptions of home. Home is revealed for the contemporary viewer of Private Hungary as a historically conditioned and contingent space; a place in which the traditional associations of refuge and sanctuary are violently exposed as a desperate, though no less desirable, fantasy.