Adoption

Márta Mészáros's 1975 Hungarian film opens with a middle-aged factory worker who wants a child. Kata has been with a married man for years and asks him for one; he refuses. In the same stretch she forms an unlikely closeness with Anna, a teenage ward of the state. Anna needs Kata's signature and support in order to marry young, and through that relationship Kata begins asking questions she has never put to herself: what motherhood is, what being a woman includes, when solitude is a choice and when it is imposed. Mészáros works in the plain, unshowy register she brought from documentary. The film won the Golden Bear in Berlin, the first time a film directed by a woman took the prize. Who it's for: viewers who want seventies Eastern European cinema and quiet drama centred on women's lives. Who it's not for: anyone looking for plot and a dramatic peak; the film stays inside the ordinary.