Marta Meszaros

Who? No, you’ve not heard of her. She’s a Hungarian film director. David Thomson’s Biographical Dictionary of F, over a thousand tightly printed pages and widely celebrated as THE BEST FILM BOOK EVER WRITTEN, doesn’t even mention her. But I’ve watched six of her films in the last month, and I thin she’s terrific.

Yup, this is another celebration of mubi.com, the magical film site which has rescued me during lockdown, and is likely to remain a faithful companion for some time. I was intrigued by the early films, realistic black and white portrayals of women and young girls, often orphaned and/or away from home. Her central characters are always sympathetically presented, but there’s no coyness or glamour involved - it’s a good, hard look at lives which are often quite tough. But she also films work and industrial processes brilliantly, and you can watch her develop over forty years - the most recent film of hers that I watched was an autobiographical account of a girl film student going back from Russia to Hungary, just after the 1956 uprising. Personal and family drama, brilliantly intercut with archive footage from the time. It’s not always perfect, but I’ve never seen anything quite like this, and I can watch ten films a month for less than the price of a single visit to the cinema.