The Cinematheque

New Restoration

“The passion of Diary comes from Miss Mészáros’s determination to do justice to history and to its victims.”

Walter Goodman, New York Times

Márta 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 for Moscow in order to pursue her dream of becoming a filmmaker. In the USSR, Juli must navigate the bureaucratic propaganda machine that demands she conform to its ideas of ​“realism”; meanwhile, she searches desperately for her missing father. Interweaving its heroine’s journey with the political upheavals of the postwar Eastern Bloc—from the death of Stalin to the short-lived promise of liberalization to the 1956 Hungarian Uprising—Diary for My Lovers is a stirring depiction of a young woman finding her voice in a world intent on stifling it.