When Marta Mészáros made her fiction-film debut in 1968 with Girl, she was on her way to becoming one of the leading women feature-film directors in world cinema. Few filmmakers, male or female, have achieved the depiction of personal needs and relationships within a finely observed political context as she has done. In Girl, 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 which leave youth of both sexes alienated.