The Life of an Agent

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Overview

The Life of an Agent, Police Training in the Kádár Era (Gabor Zsigmond Papp, 2004), uses a series of films shot by the Hungarian Interior Ministry between 1958 and 1988 and screened for generations after generations of secret police agents thus taught about methods designed to protect the state socialist regime: secret searches of homes, operational monitoring of enemy persons, the installation of audio surveillance equipment, and the organization of networks of informers. The film, which works exclusively with secret police material, sheds significant light on the mechanisms of the maintenance of power despite all the paranoia and the battle waged against its own citizens.