Documentary • 2014 • 58 minutes

Forty-year-old academic economist Miklos Nemeth was more surprised than anyone when he was named Prime Minister of Hungary. It was 1989, and the Communist system was on the brink of collapse. Nemeth, an outsider with few friends in the Party, was charged with the seemingly impossible task of saving the country from bankruptcy.

1989 is a gripping documentary that takes us behind the scenes of Nemeth's administration, during the most critical year in recent European history. As Nemeth travels to Berlin, Bonn, Bucharest, and Moscow, meeting with his increasingly worried fellow Warsaw Pact leaders and German Chancellor Helmut Kohl, the film reveals the unsung role Hungary played in the fall of the Berlin Wall and subsequent collapse of Communism throughout Eastern Europe.

Built around extensive contemporary interviews with Nemeth, 1989 creatively uses archival footage and meeting transcripts voiced by actors, providing a unique sense of immediacy and urgency to this remarkable story.