Márta Mészáros

Barbara is a young mother of two in Hungary whose everyday life is abruptly collapses when a friend in Poland dies. Barbara travels to the funeral and meets an actress and experiences an intense love story.Read More »

After her husband dies, a woman questions her love for her husband and whether or not to accept money from the insurance policy. Tensions mount when her estranged son returns to the familial home with his girlfriend.Read More »

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1936. Sylvia a rich but sterile woman, marries Akos but needs an heir to inherit her father’s money. She bribes Irene a Jewish girl to have a child by her husband.Read More »

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Fourteen year old Juli returns with her adopted grandfather and grandmother to Budapest in 1947 having spent the war in Moscow, as communists escaping the Nazi regime. They return to find the country in an effective puppet dictatorship and under extreme Stalinist rule. They are billeted with Magda, a self-styled ‘aunt’ who is also a high ranking official in the state police, though was once a radical revolutionary. Juli immediately distrusts her and rebels at every opportunity, but she befriends Janos, another old time radical who has escaped before and who is always under threat of arrest.Read More »

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Single factory worker Kata, 43, wants to have a child with her long-time secret lover, a married man called Joska. He doesn’t like the idea. Kata befriends teenage schoolgirl Anna, abandoned by her parents at the age of six. Anna runs away from the local children’s home and moves in with Kata so that she can keep on seeing her boyfriend Sanyi. Kata goes to see Anna’s parents and persuades them to give the young lovers their permission to marry. Through Anna, Kata becomes interested in neglected children and decides to adopt a baby from the children’s home.Read More »

Holdudvar (1969)

A woman attends the funeral of her husband after he dies in an airplane crash. She returns home and begins to have feelings of ambivalent emptiness and decides she never really loved him. She contemplates refusing a government insurance policy taken out on her late spouse, a respected scientist. Her son returns home with the girlfriend that prompted his earlier estrangement from the family. The bereaved widow accepts the son and his girlfriend in a conciliatory gesture. When the son discovers his mother may turn down the money, he drugs her and she is imprisoned in a country house. The mother and the girl soon realize the boy may be just like his opportunistic and uncaring father, as both women view the son in a different light. Both women come to the realization that there is life beyond what a man may dictate in this inspiring film of female liberation.Read More »

A young woman leaves a state orphanage to find her mother in this interesting examination of
how the overt repression of women in the older pattern of village life has been replaced by
the more subtle sexual and economic exploitation inherent in the apparently freer existence
of young girls in the contemporary city. A key film from Marta Meszaros.Read More »

IMDB description:
A village-girl (Juli Kovács) arrives in the city to work in a factory. The work manager (János Bodnár) sets his eye on her, but at first the girl refuses his advance.Read More »

This story follows a young student, who is orphaned as she grows to adulthood in the shadow of the 1956 Hungarian uprising. Coming from the Communist intelligentsia, she sees her friends and family react differently. Her lover, a married factory manager, supports the patriots and later assists fellow workers in staging a strike. Meanwhile her sister and others express anger at being forced from their homes during the revolution and continue to express a hatred for the rebels afterwards. But in the end they realize that for all people, real life is not possible after the revolt and its brutal suppression by the Soviets and their collaborators.Read More »