One of the first Hungarian films directed by a woman, Márta Mészáros’s debut feature is an assured expression of many of her recurring themes: broken families, the relationships between parents and children, and the search for stability in an uncertain world.

Family ties become a trap from which a woman struggles to escape in Mészáros’s quietly devastating sophomore feature.

One of Mészáros’s most formally experimental works due to its minimal dialogue and almost proto–music video style, Don’t Cry, Pretty Girls! reflects the cultural sea change sweeping Europe at a time when traditional values were being shaken by a youthquake of individual self-expression.

A captivating critique of generational discord and class distinctions in ‘70s Hungary, Mészáros’s fourth feature conjures a sense of existential entrapment in a blossoming relationship.

Mészáros brings her documentary background to bear on this masterful parable about female self-actualization in 1970s Hungary, the winner of the Golden Bear at the 1975 Berlinale.

A defiant woman asserts her autonomy in the face of a disapproving society in Mészáros’s complex look at the ways in which women’s bodies and minds are held in check by the strictures of patriarchy.

Two women, each at a critical crossroads in life and love, find refuge in their friendship with one another in this multilayered look at female solidarity.

The luminous Isabelle Huppert stars in this recently restored drama from Hungarian filmmaker Márta Mészáros, set in 1936 Budapest, in which she plays a young Jewish seamstress recruited by a much wealthier friend (Lili Monori) to conceive a baby.

Winner of the Grand Prix at Cannes, Diary for My Children is a heartrending personal testimony from an artist revisiting the traumas of the past with a clear and critical eye.

Mészáros’s follow-up to Diary for My Children picks up the story of teenage Juli (Zsuzsa Czinkóczi), the director’s alter ego, as she defies the wishes of her Stalinist aunt (Anna Polony) and leaves Hungary in order to pursue her dream of becoming a filmmaker in Moscow.

The heartrending final installment of Mészáros’s autobiographical Diary trilogy continues to trace the journey of Juli (Zsuzsa Czinkóczi), a young orphan, through the tumult of postwar Hungary.