International media production, shooting locations, and illiberal spatial projects: The case of Budapest, Hungary

This article uses the case of international media production in Budapest, Hungary, to think through how film and television locations get articulated to the spatial politics of Hungary’s government, which has grown increasingly illiberal since 2010 alongside an exploding international production sector. To date, most academic studies of location shooting have focused on either the use of locations by film and television producers, or the ways that liberal, Western-style governments use locations to attract tourism dollars and international media capital. While the Hungarian government uses international productions for economic purposes as well, it also seeks to tether location shooting to its own illiberal spatial projects. I develop a typology of the different uses of locations—spectacular and unspectacular, masked and unmasked—and how these different uses facilitate specific illiberal spatial politics, including the refurbishment of nationalist monuments important to the party’s ethnonationalist ideology; the unequal distribution of infrastructural wealth to wealthier, pro-government districts; and the near exclusion of oppositional domestic projects from shooting in much of the city. At the same time, I show how criticisms of the illiberal Hungarian government also seep into international media productions through unmasked, unspectacular location shooting. While many of the political details in the article may be specific to Hungary, the typology I develop for studying the political uses of locations by host countries should be transferrable to a wide range of cases.