The second instalment in the trilogy continues the story of Juli, the director’s alter ego. Defying Magda, her guardian, she leaves Hungary for Moscow, determined to become a filmmaker. There, Juli confronts the machinery of propaganda and bureaucracy, which demands that art conform to the doctrine of socialist realism. At the same time, she searches desperately for her missing father. Mészáros turns cinema into a form of first-person testimony. The film traces a young artist’s coming of age and her evolving relationship with cinema: for Juli, it is not merely an art form, but a means of survival and of forging her own identity under a regime hostile to individuality. The film won the Silver Bear at the Berlin International Film Festival.
