Lyrical and lush, Márta Mészáros’s award-winning autobiographical film masterfully maps the personal against a changing political landscape.

Teenage Juli (Zsuzsa Czinkóczi) returns to live in Hungary with her aunt Magda (Anna Polony), a staunch Stalinist, in 1947. Since she was a child, Juli had been living in the Soviet Union; her family migrated before the war, but the Soviet general secretary’s violent purges left her an orphan. Life with the fervent Magda takes some getting used to, and as Stalinism takes over throughout Hungary, Juli rebels against her aunt’s beliefs to find her own political voice and convictions.

Winner of the 1984 Cannes Grand Prix, Diary for My Children is the first of Mészáros’s acclaimed ‘diary films’, a series of narrative features that follows the basic outline of her life. Here, Juli’s story is Mészáros’s own: her exiled parents and their deaths, and her political, artistic and feminist awakening. Shooting in stunning black-and-white, the director blends newsreel footage into her vision of postwar Hungary; what results is an excavation of the ghosts of memory, a work of art made in defiance of forgetting, and a profoundly unsentimental expression of women’s creative and intellectual freedom from a filmmaker at the height of her powers.

“Nothing short of a masterpiece and a cornerstone of Hungarian cinema.” – MUBI Notebook