In her first feature, Márta Mészáros achieved a rare and delicate balance, the depiction of personal relationships and needs within a finely observed political context. A lonely young working-class woman who has grown up in an orphanage seeks her real mother, only to find herself being passed off as a niece. Told in intuitive vignettes, the story has autobiographical elements that would appear in other of the director's films. Mészáros, born in 1931, grew up an orphan and a perpetual foreigner after her parents (the sculptor László Mészáros and his wife), who had emigrated to the Soviet Union, perished in Stalin's concentration camps. In her films she often depicts a profound restlessness and a search for personal truth among not one, but two generations of women, and examines the stratifications within Hungarian society that leave youth of both sexes alienated.