The first film directed by a woman to win the Golden Bear at the Berlin Film Festival, Adoption tells the intertwined stories of a middle-aged factory worker who wishes to have a child with her married lover and a teenage ward of the state determined to emancipate herself in order to marry her boyfriend. Co-written and directed by Márta Mészáros — who you can read more about in this 2017 interview — Adoption operates within a documentary style as it reflects the filmmaker’s upbringing in post-Stalinist Hungary and other issues that were often ignored in Eastern European cinema at the time, such as the oppression of women, the generation gap, the evolution of the traditional family, and the difficulties faced by state-reared children.
Although Mészáros’s work was dismissed as simply “women’s pictures” in her native country, Adoption is an unflinching, masterful look at the interiority of women’s lives and their everyday struggles. The film will be shown at IU Cinema on September 13 and will be preceded by a special virtual introduction from film scholar and critic Dr. Elena Gorfinkel (Senior Lecturer in Film Studies, King’s College London), who previously wrote an essay about the film for the Criterion Collection.
A new 4K restoration of Adoption will be screened at IU Cinema on September 13 at 7 pm as part of the Women on Top series.