Adoption
Mészáros gives aching expression to the experiences of women in 1970s Hungary in this sensitive and absorbing slice-of-life drama, which became the first film directed by a woman to win the Golden Bear at the Berlin Film Festival. Through intensely intimate camerawork, Mészáros immerses the viewer in the lives of two women, each searching for fulfillment: Kata (Katalin Berek), a middle-aged factory worker who wishes to have a child with her married lover, and Anna (Gyöngyvér Vigh), a teenage ward of the state determined to emancipate herself in order to marry her boyfriend. The bond that forms between the two speaks quietly but powerfully to the social and political forces that shape women’s lives as each navigates the realities of love, marriage, and motherhood in her quest for self-determination.

DIRECTOR: Márta Mészáros. WRITTEN BY: Márta Mészáros, Gyula Hernádi, Ferenc Grunwalsky. CAST: Katalin Berek, Gyöngyvér Vigh, Péter Fried. 1975. 86 min. Hungary. B&W. Hungarian. DCP.

Nine Months
A defiant woman asserts her autonomy in the face of a disapproving society in Mészáros’s complex look at the ways in which women’s bodies and minds are held in check by the strictures of patriarchy. Frequent Mészáros collaborator Lili Monori delivers a fearless performance as Juli, a young woman who begins a new job at a brick factory where she is immediately pursued by possessive coworker János (Jan Nowicki)—a relationship that grows complicated when he discovers she is raising a son from a previous lover. Mészáros’s background as a documentarian is evident in her feeling for the industrial landscapes of Northern Hungary and in the astonishing final scene in which the boundaries between actress and character are radically dissolved.