The Girl

Márta Mészáros’ stunning directorial debut – the first Hungarian film to have been made by a woman – announced the arrival of a vital new voice in European cinema.

Having grown up in a Budapest orphanage, Erzsi – now in her early 20s – decides to locate her biological mother, placing ads in newspapers and on the radio. When a woman replies, Erzsi travels to a village to meet her and her new family on the farm where they live, agreeing to pretend to be her niece. But Erzsi finds a person and a place insurmountably different from what she knows and what she was hoping for.

The Girl is a deeply personal story with all the autobiographical elements that establish the typical Mészáros protagonist: a woman, impassive and cool, seeking self-knowledge and resisting society’s expectations. Mészáros herself grew up an orphan in Russia after the death of her sculptor father in a Soviet purge and then her mother not long after from illness, returning to Hungary only after WWII. Her first feature, made in 1968 after a decade of documentary shorts, blends the personal and the political – Erzsi’s intimate story is attuned to the upheavals and abandonments of her birth nation throughout the Soviet era.