Márta Mészáros

This West Coast debut of the first US retrospective of Márta Mészáros’s films brings together essential new restorations that reveal her to be one of postwar European cinema’s major unsung voices. Few female directors emerged from 1960s Europe to carve out so enduring a career, one that has spanned more than half a century and continues to this day. Mészáros brings her own life experiences to her intimate, deeply personal films. As an orphan whose father was killed in the Stalinist purges, as a Hungarian raised in the USSR and caught between Soviet oppression and her country’s struggle for independence, and as a woman navigating the promises of a burgeoning feminist movement, Mészáros returns time and again to themes of motherhood, nontraditional families, relationships between women, and the traumas of 20th-century Hungarian history. Her rich and cohesive body of work—uniquely attuned to the social, economic, and political forces that govern the lives of working people, especially women—has made her one of Central Europe’s foremost directors and a pioneer among women filmmakers worldwide.