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Zsolt Bánki grew up in Budapest in a middle class Catholic intellectual family. His parents did not join the party, and in general their home was an isolated world of dissidence. This deeply affected Bánki, who developed an interest in everything that was forbidden by the regime. In high school, for example, he developed a vivid interest in the 1956 Hungarian revolution.

Catholicism played a significant part in his life: he belonged to the Regnum Marianum community. He was aware at an early age of what it mean to be under surveillance to be suspected of conspiracy: the community was monitored by the political police, and Bánki remembers officers waiting for the children to come out of the parish church and counting them. He also attended church camps, from where the participants were not allowed to send postcards, and taking photographs was strictly forbidden: organizers wanted to prevent the secret police from gathering information on the members, activities, and locations of the camp. Bánki's parents were reading and collecting theological and religious typescripts and mimeograph printed materials. Some of them were printed by OMC Verlag or Krupp Verlag and smuggled into Hungary. 

Naturally, Bánki himself kept a distance from the party. He did not join the Hungarian Young Communist League until a couple of months before his university entrance exams. This did not help, though, as he was not accepted. In high school, one of his greatest fears was that he would not be allowed to continue his studies because he had had some run-ins with the authorities. On the 25th anniversary of the outbreak of the 1956 revolution, on 23 October 1981, he and his friend visited the statue of Józef Bem, a symbolic site of the uprising. His friend placed a rose at the feet of the monument. As a result, his friend was excluded from higher education, and was only able to get a degree only after the change of regimes. Two years later, he was caught in the course of a police raid in the Rajk Boutique, a famous illegal shop of samizdat materials which operated out of László Rajk's flat at 3 Galamb Street.

The world of samizdat was opened to Bánki by journalist Sándor Révész, who prepared Bánki for the university entry exams. Révész invited the young Bánki to join him and go to the boutique: this was a formative experience for Bánki. He kept on going back, but once in the spring of 1983, he ran into political police officers, who took Gábor Demszky away in handcuffs, and Bánki was summoned to the police station. He was frightened, thinking that his dreams about university studies would be ruined. Arriving home, he destroyed his significant samizdat collection with the exception of a treasured book of poetry, Eternal Monday, by György Petri, and the poem One Sentence on Tyranny by Gyula Illyés. He also called Révész to tell him that he would give him up, but in the end he told the police that he had heard about the boutique on Radio Free Europe. He was let to go.

In 1993, he started to work at the Special Collection of Contemporary History at the National Széchényi Library. This was practically identical with the collection that was called the Closed Stack of Publications before the change of regimes. He is currently head of the Department of Library and Informatics at the Petőfi Literary Museum.

Zoltán Bíró (1941–) is a Hungarian literary historian and politician. He studied Hungarian language and literature at Eötvös Lóránd University. He completed his degree in 1969. In 1970–1971, he taught at the National Council of Trade Unions. In 1971, he began working in the Ministry of Culture, between 1974 and 1980 as a head of a department and between 1980 and 1981 as a head of main department. In 1981–1983, he served as acting director of the Petőfi Literary Museum. Between 1983 and 1988, he was a main member of the staff at the National Széchényi Library. In 1988, he began to teach as a member of the faculty at the University of Szeged. In 1987, he took part in the foundation of the Hungarian Democratic Forum (HDF), and he was expelled from the Hungarian Socialist Workers’ Party. In 1988–1990, he was a member of the presidium of the HDF. In 1989, he became acting president of the party. In 1990, he left the HDF. Between 1991 and 1996, he was associate president of the National Democratic Fellowship. Since 2014, he has served as the main director of the Research Institute and Archive of the Hungarian Regime Change.

Movie director. Studied at Eötvös Loránd University at the departments of philosophy and history between 1964 and 1971. His thesis was entitled “Investigation of the Meaning-Structure of a Film: Attribution of Meaning in Film.” He has conducted persistent research on semiotics and narratology since his university years, which resulted in significant essays on moving images, though also promoted his filmmaking.

As a student, he wrote screenplays and participated in the making of films (e.g., Agitators in 1969). He made his first independent film, called The Third, in 1971. As a result, he was elected as a member to the Béla Balázs Studio (BBS). Between 1971 and 1975, he was a student at the Academy of Drama and Film at the department of film and television direction.

He organized the first experimental project at BBS, the Film Language series, in 1973. He invited visual artists, composers and writers as well to participate in this project. Within the framework of this project, he made Four Bagatells in 1975. In this series, he experimented with different masking techniques and one of its episodes became part of media history as the first Hungarian-made video.

In the film he made for the completion of his degree, American Torso (1975), he utilized the so-called “light-editing” technique that he invented to archaize the material. This film won the prize for the best debut film at the 25th Internationale Filmwoche in Mannheim, Germany, and later won the Award of Hungarian Critics. The film was first rejected by the academy; only after its international success was it accepted as a graduation project.

He made an instructional film for television, called Film School, in 1976, television dramas entitled Soldiers in 1977 and Chalk Circle in 1978 and a so-called “analytical documentary” called Private History in 1978. In 1976, he became the creator of the first Hungarian computer animation, entitled Psychocosmos. His three-part film Psyche, released in 1980, won several prizes (Hungarian Feature Film Festival; Cannes, Quinzaine des Réalisateurs; Locarno, Bronz Leopard; Figuera da Foz, CIDALC Prize).

Together with his wife, Veronika Baksa Soós, he initiated the first international video magazine, Infermental, in 1980. He established the experimental (K) section of Mafilm Hungarian Film Studios, where he conducted technical and methodological research. After his DAAD scholarship, he held seminars at the Deutsche Film- und Fernsehakademie in Berlin in 1982, 1983 and 1985. He made his third feature film in 1983, called The Dog's Night Song, in which he played the role of the protagonist. This same year, a retrospective of his works was held at the DAAD Gallery in Berlin.

Gábor Bódy was one of the most original cinematographic experimenters during the 1970s and 1980s. Critics referred to his experimental, subversive works that searched for new modes of expression as part of the phenomenon called “new sensitivity,” “new narrativity,” or sometimes “new eclecticism.”

Bódy died in Budapest under unclear circumstances at the age of 39 in 1985. According to the official investigation, he committed suicide, but many people do not believe this finding. This suspicion gained strength after it turned out at the end of the millennium that he had collaborated with the III/III division of the Hungarian Secret Police.