Márta Mészáros

Reconstructions of unrealized Hungarian films in cooperation with the greatest Hungarian film directors.

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Maria Zmarz-Koczanowicz directed this insightful TV documentary (2005) tracing the Polish filmmaker's career. Former classmates reminisce about Kieslowski's happy beginnings at the Lodz film school and how his dissatisfaction with some of his early documentaries prompted the dramatic work and stylistic experimentation that led to his monumental series of films The Decalogue (1989). Wim Wenders, Agnieszka Holland, and Juliette Binoche are among the many admirers weighing in on his hard-driving work methods and preoccupation with the ephemeral. In Polish, French, and German with subtitles.

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The film tells about the famous Lithuanian director Vytautas Žalakevičius. The film contains many excerpts from the director's films and conversations with him. Here he talks about life, creativity and about himself. Vytautas Žalakevičius is remembered by his friends and associates.

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Documentary about film director Marta Meszaros featuring on-set interviews with the director and creative collaborators

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A talk show presented by Michel Drucker

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The Aurora Borealis is a story of family that is rich in twists and turns. It breaks the depths of the relationship between mother and daughter. A successful lawyer in Vienna, Olga is called back to Hungary when her old mother, Mary suddenly falls into a coma. While Mary is floating between life and death, Olga finds a deeply silent secret. The increasingly passionate research leads back to the post-war Europe of the '50s.

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Anthology film made as an act of protest against Hungarian government of Viktor Orban.

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One of the doyennes of Hungarian film deals with a dark period of national history: the Soviet regime in Hungary. She portrays it through the fate of the former prime minister and national hero, Imre Nagy. The script is based on the diary written by Imre Nagy, and the memories of his daughter, Erzsébet Nagy, as well as authentic documents and records.

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The movie is inspired by writer-director Márta Mészáros' own childhood. The film is a grim reminder of horrible days under Stalinist period when several innocent people were persecuted for no fault. A good film which allow people to know how people in Europe were tortured before second world war by dictators and authoritarian regimes.

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A story of a mother who had to change her profession from a teacher to a high class prostitute to make a living.

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An expressionist biography of Edith Stein, who converted from the Jewish faith to the Catholic one and became a Carmelite sister. She would die in a German concentration camp.

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This drama follows the dilemma of a young, unwillingly pregnant wife who gives her child up for adoption by a businesswoman. Anna doesn't need another mouth to feed. She can barely afford to care for the two she already has so when she discovers that she is six weeks pregnant she readily accepts the cash offer from Terez, her tough boss at the store where she works. If she will isolate herself throughout the pregnancy, secretly bear the child and immediately allow Terez to sign for it, Anna will receive $50,000. Most of the story then focuses upon Anna's emotional processes as she evaluates her choice. Included are dream segments and shots an unborn baby in the womb.

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This story follows a young student, who is orphaned as she grows to adulthood in the shadow of the 1956 Hungarian uprising. Coming from the Communist intelligentsia, she sees her friends and family react differently. Her lover, a married factory manager, supports the patriots and later assists fellow workers in staging a strike. Meanwhile her sister and others express anger at being forced from their homes during the revolution and continue to express a hatred for the rebels afterwards. But in the end they realize that for all people, real life is not possible after the revolt and its brutal suppression by the Soviets and their collaborators.

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Fanny lives in the forest with her meteorologist mother. One day on her way across the forest to visit her grandmother and great grandmother, she has three encounters that will change her life forever: an apparently kind and gentle wolf, a city boy and an ornithologist who bears a striking resemblance to the father who long ago abandoned her and her mother.

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A continuation of "Diary for My Children," the film picks up in 1950, when Juli, the diarist, is 18 and determined to become a movie director.

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A Polish guest and Finnish engineer both fall for the same mysterious woman.

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After having lost her parents, young Juli returns from the Soviet Union to her native Budapest. Scarred by the wounds of the past, the ghost of Stalin’s oppression haunts her as she reunites with her aunt and adoptive mother Magda.

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Anna is a stylist in Budapest. One day at a restaurant, she thinks she recognizes Marie Aubier, a 22-year-old French girl, her own daughter.

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During the rising of nazism, Sylvia, a rich but sterile woman, needs an heir to inherit her father's money. So she bribes Irene, a Jewish girl, to have a child by her husband.

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Barbara is a forty-year-old woman of Polish origin living in Budapest. She is a biologist, a wife and a mother. The death of her woman friend opens her eyes to the fact that she is lonely, unable to find her place.

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On his return from America, András simply cannot find his place: he has lost his wife, friends and job, and he cannot even find his way back to his former great love. Eventually, as a surrogate father, he takes in a wild young girl (Zsuzsa Czinkóczi) and a particularly strong bond is formed between these two rootless people. Márta Mészáros’s remarkable movie starring Jan Nowicki and Anna Karina is about displacement, loneliness and attachment.

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Looking for a safe place to live after being harassed by her husband, a depressive and violent man, Juli stays at a women's shelter run by Mária.

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Juli, who works in a brick factory, begins a romantic relationship with her boss, to whom she hides the fact that she has a son.

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When middle-aged Kata realises that her life will only be complete if she has a baby of her own, her longstanding-but-married boyfriend Joska refuses to comply. But by developing an unlikely friendship with the angst-ridden teenage orphan Anna, who is also involved in a controversial relationship, Kata discovers aspects of herself, and her role as a woman, that have gone unexamined throughout her entire, lonely life.

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Jutka, a young woman who works in a factory, falls in love with Andras, a university student. She pretends to be a student, to him and to his parents, and begins to live a lie. Finally she rebels against Andras and his demands and the social conventions that forced her to live a lie.

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A candid portrait of the women working at the Lőrinc spinning mill. As with so many of Mészáros’ shorts, this work has foundations in autobiography, and she would later return to this particular world in one of her fiction features.

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Edit, who became the wife of a politician out of a simple peasant girl, suddenly becomes a widow as a result of an accident. She never loved her husband. She lives a wealthy and lonely life amidst false friends, facing one of the last alternatives of her life, i.e. having to face her past in the hope of an independent new beginning.

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On receiving a letter from her mother, a quiet working-class girl leaves the state orphanage in Budapest where she grew up and takes a trip to the rural countryside to visit her.

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Hungarian documentary that commemorates the life and work of director and artist László Mészáros through archival footage and personal testimonies. A heartfelt portrait of a significant voice in Eastern European auteur cinema.

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A day in the solitary life of Pista, a single child of divorced parents. The boy skips school and explores the city of Budapest by himself, yet can't escape an unbearable ennui. Like Mészáros's ADOPTION, this early short film explores the themes of broken family bonds; it also offers insight into the origins of the director’s career.

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Documentary film directed by Márta Mészáros.

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The film presents several young people from rural areas whom the new communist regime helped to integrate into the labor field of the socialist state, thus breaking with the ancestral tradition.

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The film's protagonists are the orphaned children taken into custody by the state and institutionalized at Children's House no. 6 from Bucharest. For Mészáros, the concern for the situation of children left orphaned during the Second World War is autobiographical: the director directly experienced the absence of parents in her own childhood.

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Short movie by Marta Meszaros

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