Bibliothèque Pascal

Mona Paparu is raising her small daughter alone. Hoping to find work abroad, she leaves the child with her fortune-telling aunt, and comes back to find custody has been taken away from her. To get her daughter back she has to tell a social worker, from beginning to end, what happened to her while she was gone. The road she describes runs through human trafficking and arrives at a strange establishment called the Bibliothèque Pascal. Szabolcs Hajdu builds that account not as flat testimony but as a remembering shot through with fairy tale; how much of what Mona says is true is deliberately left open. It shows the exploitation without offering the audience a display of it. The film was named best film of the year in Hungary and became the country's entry for the foreign language Oscar. Orsolya Török-Illyés, in the lead, appears in most of the director's films.