Barna Szász is a Budapest-born filmmaker and video-journalist specialized in the young genre of online videos. Starting out as a video-journalist at the largest Hungarian news magazine, Index.hu, he later became the leader of the video team for the portal that has 1 million visitors a day.

 

From the 1-minute Instagram videos to the 25-minutes-long short documentaries he believes that online videos and immersive experiences are the best tools to affect today's society. Being able to reach millions of people Barna’s passion is to inspire viewers with personally engaging stories, and to make society better by presenting social-political issues and problems that would not reach newer generations through traditional media. 

 

From more than 200 videos that he has produced in his country his face is most known for the one where he ran faster than the tube in Budapest, but his most popular works are when he dealt with social topics: More than 400,000 people watched when he took anti-refugee hate-commenters to meet actual refugees, and 13,000 shared We Don’t Exist, his semi-documentaristic short film about how the Hungarian government manipulates the statistics of poverty in the country. Over the years he won the Media for Talents award and the Hegeto Honorka award for presenting issues of the socially disadvantaged.

 

In 2016, he cofounded the Video Journalism certificate program at Moholy-Nagy University of Arts and Design, Budapest, and from 2017 he is a Fulbright Scholar pursuing his MFA in Documentary Film at Stanford University. Beyond diving deep into 2D cinema, Barna dedicates his time at Stanford to 360 and VR studies, exploring the storytelling potential of both classical and new emerging media.

Fulbright Scholarship, 2017

Rosztóczy Scholarship, 2018

Hungary Initiatives Foundation Scholarship, 2018