Eltávozott nap

By 1973 – the year in which the First International Women’s Film Seminar took place in Berlin – Márta Mészáros had made over 30 short films and documentaries, as well as three long feature films. At that time, however, it was mainly her first feature film ELTÁVOZOTT NAP that had attracted attention in (West) Germany. With a title not easy to translate (sometimes rendered in English as The Day Has Gone), the film was distributed internationally and in Germany as THE GIRL or DAS MÄDCHEN. It stars Kati Kovács, a well-known pop singer, in the not-so-girly role of Erzsi Szőnyi, an independent and self-confident young woman and factory worker who grew up in an orphanage in Budapest after her mother gave her away to remarry in the post-war period. With sharp cuts and in a high-contrast black and white, we see a sequence of everyday situations in Erzsi’s life at a time when she decides to go in search of her mother and her own past. However, “The film is more about generational rejection of tradition than the search for familial bonds: the stark contrast of light and dark reflects the juxtaposition of emancipation and patriarchy” (Dina Iordanova). ELTÁVOZOTT NAP was one of the only Eastern European feature film included in the 1973 program in Berlin. (Borjana Gaković)