Don't Cry, Pretty Girls!
This Hungarian filmmaker was one of the pioneers of women's cinema written in the first person. Screened occasionally in Quebec, her films have not been seen for a long time, despite a longstanding closeness (she directed one of the Contes pour tous, produced by Rock Demers). Thanks to a major restoration project, we are presenting new prints of her most emblematic films, as well as two films from our collections.
This music-driven counterculture snapshot unfolds to a near wall-to-wall soundtrack of late 1960s-early 1970s Hungarian psych and folk as it traces the odyssey of a young woman (Jaroslava Schallerová, star of the Czech New Wave classic Valerie and Her Week of Wonders) who, on the eve of her marriage to a factory worker, experiences a final moment of freedom when she runs away with a touring band.

Márta Mészáros
Born in Hungary, Márta Mészáros spent her early years in the Soviet Union, her communist father having fled there to escape the dictatorship of his native country. But he disappeared during Stalin's purges at the end of the 1930s. Shortly afterwards, Mészáros also lost her mother. These early tragedies had an impact on the autobiographical part of her work. Following her film studies in Moscow, she returned to Hungary and made many short films, especially documentaries, an aspect that would persist in her later work. In the 1960s, she joined the Mafilm Group 4 and met the filmmaker Miklós Jancsó, who became her husband. In 1968, Cati made her the first woman to direct a feature film in Hungary. Mészáros then made a series of films, sometimes defying censorship and never shying away from any social issue. Political, feminist and formally audacious, her work has met with both critical and public success over the years, making her a key name in Eastern European cinema.

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Don't Cry, Pretty Girl by Márta Mészáros

Don't Cry, Pretty Girl by Márta Mészáros

Don't Cry, Pretty Girl by Márta Mészáros

Don't Cry, Pretty Girl by Márta Mészáros