Juli, a Hungarian teenager who was orphaned after her father was shot during the Stalinist purges, returns from the Soviet Union to be raised by an aunt with a blind faith in communism. Realizing that the regime is also reigning terror in Hungary, Juli fights to become an independent woman.

The first in a ravishing quartet that Mészáros made based on her turbulent early life, this moving coming-of-age story is pursued by the phantoms of a complicated national history. Entwined with bittersweet memories and movie-going, Mészáros’s profoundly personal film won the Grand Prix at Cannes.