Hungary's recent past, the world of the early 1950s, was Péter Bacsó's focus in the rich satire The Witness (1969) as well as in more recent films including The Day Before Yesterday and Oh, Bloody Life. An actress is arrested on the night of her greatest theatrical triumph and, despite her protestations that she is not an aristocrat, deported to a distant village. There she lives among exiled barons and counts, idling away the hours in a way of life that represents the exact opposite of her artistic sensibility.