About

A painter's daughter who didn't think of herself as creative — design school in Strasbourg, film directing in Bucharest, then into the Budapest industry through the edit room.

Nearly two years as an assistant editor, watching serious productions from the inside, before an internship advertisement led to Judit “Csuti” Varga at Prop Club, who handed over a first assignment within the hour. The breakthrough came on Netflix's Barbarians: as an assistant set decorator under German designer Thomas Stammer, sketching and designing set pieces — work that in Hungary usually belongs to the art director. The connections made there led to art direction, and from there to production design.

Every project since has begun the same way: break the script down, then research — deep enough, on a period film, to be sourcing 1940s Ukrainian architecture and street signage — before putting a vision on top of it. Not just documenting, but infusing our own vision into the project.

Ambition is the brief; the budget is the puzzle. Most of what a script needs is already standing somewhere, and the work is seeing it — then getting access to it, and transforming it until it reads as the world. Building from scratch is part of the job too, and a €700,000 village came out of bare ground. But the sharper skill is the other one, and it rests on things that don't usually get listed as design: the conversations that unlock a location, and the logistics that move a unit through a real place without losing it. The ambition is never the problem. Making it real is the work.

On set, the closest working relationships are with the director and the cinematographer — one conversation about the world the characters live in, the other about how it will be lit. Behind that sits the art department, construction, props, vehicles and armoury. Little emphasis on hierarchy; a close relationship with everyone on the team.