A GRANDMOTHER IS PROJECTING A FILMSTRIP FOR HER GRANDCHILD on the small stage of a studio theater in Budapest. She is telling a tale of an Indian tribe, seemingly of distant America, from the world of Karl May's Winnetou, about the friendship of the tribe's Chief Gray Eagle and its medicine man, Black Moon, who together led the Apaches. The audience soon learns, however, that this tale is not about some imaginary tribe in May's books but about a real group of “Hungarian Indians,” young men and women who spent their free time “playing Indians” in the late 1950s and early 1960s. They sewed authentic Native American clothes, used Indian tools, practiced archaic rituals, and, most importantly, strived to establish a tribal sense of belonging, unconditional trust, and communion, under the surveillance of the totalitarian communist regime.

The play Apaches on the Danube is based on dramaturg Krisztina Kovács's research at the Historical Archive of the Hungarian State Security, which guards the files of the former state security and secret police. There, while researching Hungarian dissident theater performances for her doctoral thesis, Kovacs came across former secret informants’ reports about the so-called Indian players as well as transcripts of interrogations. The files depict how the Hungarian secret police collected information about the gatherings, and how they infiltrated this group to uncover the “conspiracy involving the youth to weaken the state and social order of the Hungarian People's Republic.” When the Radnóti Theater in Budapest commissioned film director Ferenc Török to stage his first theatrical piece, Kovács recommended this charged topic and, in collaboration with Hungarian playwright Géza Bereményi, wrote the play Apaches on the Danube. The production opened in October 2009, and soon after, Török also shot a televised drama of the piece (using the same title) which won the Best Television Drama Award at the Hungarian National Film Festival in May 2010.

The production's creators had no desire to single out and expose one particular former informant, so they decided not to focus on the story of a real person or a real group of people whose acts, collaborative or dissident, were preserved in the records of the Historical Archives. What they aspired to do instead was to create a fictitious but historically authentic narrative that would provide for the audience an affective experience about life under the surveillance of the secret police in communist Hungary.