In Search of a Legend, The Puskás Secret... I was trying out (in Hungarian) other possible titles for this film, but they sounded more pompous than the original. And that was before I had even started on English, which gives real scope for over-the-top bombast: Puskas—the Film, The Ultimate Biography, and so on, all promising something definitive, unrivalled, unbeatable.
But then again, why not? After all, it's hardly exaggerating to call Ferenc Puskás the most famous of all Hungarians. I and many other Hungarians have frequently found his is the name that travelled furthest. I had to hear it with my own ears before I believed it. If anyone had asked me to name the "most famous Hungarian", I would have answered Bartók, Kodály, Franz Liszt or, if pushed, John von Neumann, Ferenczi or Georg Lukács. Perhaps Houdini or Béla Lugosi, to include mass culture. But there is nowhere, from Salonika to the Outer Hebrides, from Campobasso to Warsaw, where Puskás's name does not come up once someone asks "And where are you from?" Older people can even rattle off the name of the entire Golden Team. One has to bow before the weight of the evidence.
Understatement is typical not only of the title but the film as a whole. The definition that the film gives—"Puskás is the most widely recognised Hungarian word"—is even better than calling him the most famous Hungarian.

In one interview he has given, the director related that one possible title that was considered was "The Real Puskás", but he rejected that. He felt he had no right to assert that what he was showing was the "real" Puskás.
The restrained, unassuming director in question is Tamás Almási. Unassuming or not, you might think he has something to be immodest about. The most highly regarded Hungarian non-fiction director, he has a background working as a cinematographer in feature films. Born in 1948, it was not until the Nineties that his career really took off, but since then he has established himself as one of Hungary's best-known documentary makers, shooting close to 30 featurelength films since the early Eighties. He has won many awards, and his films are seen by hundreds of thousands of viewers. This is despite the paucity of venues and audiences for documentary films in Hungary. A television screening in itself is a huge stroke of luck, and documentaries on DVD are as rare as hen's teeth, but screenings in actual cinemas are nowadays the stuff of dreams. Since the few years that followed Hungary's transition to democracy, when documentary films exploring previously taboo subjects and history's blank spots drew big audiences (see my review in HQ 169), Almási's achievement has been unparalleled.

Ferenc Puskás himself was still alive when work got under way, though by then he was seriously ill and unable to communicate, and his closest relatives, too, refused to be filmed (he died on 17th November 2006). The 100-minute film draws on a large archive of material that is available, both on film and in the form of documents, in every part of the world, as Puskás appeared as a player or manager in scores of countries around the globe, on every continent. This made the greatest challenge: how to order and balance all material without squeezing out Puskás himself. Another difficulty was that the film was meant for an international audience from the start. Puskás may be a recognised figure all over the globe, but different countries and different age-groups have rather divergent views about, for instance, conditions in Hungary during the forties and fifties, the particular place that sport occupied and its role in the Communist

system, whereas the (incomplete) picture that Hungarian viewers have of Puskás's activities, of his life outside the country is necessarily distorted by the political propaganda of the time. Putting together the portrait of Ferenc Puskás must have been like assembling a jigsaw puzzle from thousands of pieces scattered around the world. These were not just in different sports clubs, archives and the stories of relatives, fellow players and friends, but also in the collective memories of millions.
Yet this film managed it. It managed to respect what a varied set of people knew, and it adds fresh facts until recently unknown. Like the youngest son of so many folk tales, who started life in poverty, Puskás through his own efforts and skill rose to the very top. Yet even as a famous star, he stayed to the end an eternal boy with a big heart.