The Films of Márta Mészáros

June 3–July 20, 2022

The Girl
The Heiresses
Riddance
Don’t Cry, Pretty Girls!
Diary for My Lovers

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Past Films

Diary for My Father and Mother
- Wednesday, July 20 7 PM
Márta Mészáros
Hungary, 1990
The heartrending final installment of Mészáros’s semi-autobiographical Diary trilogy continues the journey of Juli, a young orphan, through the tumult of postwar Hungary.
Diary for My Lovers
- Friday, July 15 7 PM
Márta Mészáros
Hungary, 1987
Mészáros’s second Diary installment follows teenage Juli, the director’s alter ego, as she leaves Hungary to become a filmmaker in Moscow and discovers that her vision of “reality” is different than Russia’s.
Diary for My Children
- Saturday, July 9 7 PM
Márta Mészáros
Hungary, 1984
Mészáros folds national history, a coming-of-age tale, and the power of cinephilia into this look at a young orphan seeking truth amidst the lies, conspiracies, and shadows of postwar Hungary.
The Heiresses
- Wednesday, July 6 7 PM
Márta Mészáros
Hungary, France, 1980
In 1936 Budapest, with Nazism on the rise, the wealthy but sterile wife of a military officer asks her young Jewish friend (Isabelle Huppert) to bear her husband’s child.
The Two of Them
- Wednesday, June 29 7 PM
Márta Mészáros
Hungary, 1977
French star Marina Vlady (Two or Three Things I Know About Her) provides the calm to Lili Monori’s rage in this astonishing look at two women at different stages of their lives.
Nine Months
- Friday, June 24 7 PM
Márta Mészáros
Hungary, 1976
A newly arrived factory worker and her foreman strike up a doomed relationship in Mészáros’s look at love—or the impossibility thereof—in a society with little room for affection.
Adoption
- Saturday, June 18 7 PM
Márta Mészáros
Hungary, 1975
Mészáros brought her documentary background to bear in this masterful parable about female self-actualization in 1970s Hungary, the winner of the Golden Bear at the 1975 Berlin Film Festival.
Riddance
- Wednesday, June 15 7 PM
Márta Mészáros
Hungary, 1973
A lower-class textile mill girl falls for a bourgeoise student in Mészáros’s biting examination of unequal social constructs—and the final freedom of smashing plates.
Don’t Cry, Pretty Girls!
- Friday, June 10 7 PM
Márta Mészáros
Hungary, 1970
Iron Curtain industrial realism merges with A Hard Day’s Night fancy in this weightless caper through the Hungarian “New Beat” underground, as downtrodden factory kids escape in rock and roll.
Binding Sentiments
- Sunday, June 5 7 PM
Márta Mészáros
Hungary, 1969
A recently widowed woman finds herself held hostage by her son and his girlfriend in this icy, Bergman-esque portrait of the maternal ties that turn to chains.
The Girl
- Friday, June 3 7 PM
Márta Mészáros
Hungary, 1968
Forget James Dean; Mészáros’s debut introduces viewers to a young female rebel without a cause, a textile factory worker searching for her past and for pleasure in her present.

The Films of Márta Mészáros

June 3–July 20, 2022

“Since my first film I have attempted in a very deliberate and stubborn way to portray women capable of making independent decisions,” wrote acclaimed Hungarian filmmaker Márta Mészáros, who at age ninety is the subject of this major retrospective featuring new digital restorations of her films. Few filmmakers (even other women filmmakers) have put women front and center—their reality, their relationships, their struggles—in the way Mészáros has. Whether in examinations of a new generation coming of age in the 1960s (The Girl; Don’t Cry, Pretty Girls!), two generations learning to work together in the 1970s (The Two of Them; Adoption), or historical dramas of the past (the Diary films), “Mészáros seems to have asked her cameraman to capture for her and help her memorize a world of women,” marvels our 1986 film note.

Born in 1931 in Budapest, Mészáros trained at Moscow’s famed VGIK...

Born in 1931 in Budapest, Mészáros trained at Moscow’s famed VGIK film school before getting her start in newsreels and documentaries in both Romania and Hungary, many of which focused on women workers. Her own remarkable story—she was an orphan whose father, the avant-garde sculptor László Mészáros, and mother died during the Stalinist purges—is dramatized in her much-praised, semi-autobiographical Diary series. “Returning time and again to themes of motherhood, nontraditional families, relationships between women, and the traumas of 20th century Hungarian history,” wrote Janus Films, “she has created a cohesive body of work that is uniquely attuned to the social, economic, and political forces that govern the lives of her complex, typically working class female characters.” No matter the era or setting, though, her characters are all united in their search for a true life and against the lie that “everything is fine” coming from their peers or elders, or from society as a whole. Indeed, as one of Mészáros’s characters heartbreakingly cries out, “Nothing is fine!”

—Jason Sanders, Film Notes Writer

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Coordinated at BAMPFA by Film Curator Kathy Geritz. Restorations undertaken by The Hungarian National Film Fund and approved by director Márta Mészáros. All DCPs from Janus Films, with thanks to Brian Belovarac.