Photographs reporting Mongolian election campaign on display in Budapest

A shepherd-shaman-poet's life amid the 2008 election campaign in Mongolia is featured at an exhibition of works by documentary filmmaker Zoltan Furedi and photo-reporter Balazs Simonyi at the DocuArt Gallery in Budapest.

Furedi told MTI ahead of the opening later on Thursday that he had travelled many times to Mongolia, and his documentary, a 65-million-forint Polish-Hungarian production, shows the election campaign from the perspective of a shepherd-shaman-cum-poet Gansukh, who first made an appearance in a film he made in 1993.

"He is an exceptionally energetic figure ... who, for example, can recite in Mongolian the Hungarian national anthem," said Furedi.

In the end, the shepherd decided to run in the campaign as an independent on an anti-corruption, education reform and environmental ticket.

Simonyi said that the election campaign had been a "huge roadshow" thanks to the enormity of the country and the sheer size of its population. He had first travelled there in 2004 as a tourist and decided to return to make a photo diary of the election, where two main parties slugged it out for three weeks.

Simonyi's 27 images will be shown together with the documentary until April 11.

The exhibition coincides with an official visit to Hungary of Mongolia's prime minister.

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