Anna Polony Movies

Edith Stein was a German-Jewish intellectual who in the late-'30s created considerable controversy and broke her mother's heart when she converted to Catholicism and then joined one of the Church's most rigorous monastic orders, the Carmelite Nuns. This European biopic tells her story, a tale that ended tragically when Stein, who finally made it through the long, painful novitiate process and found true peace, was brutally yanked from the convent by Nazi soldiers and sent to Auschweitz where she died. ~ Sandra Brennan, All Movie Guide

This is the third of the very autobiographical and very anti-communist "diary" movies made by noted Hungarian woman director Marta Meszaros. Since it takes up where the second film left off, it is helpful to have seen the previous films in order to make sense of the story. Set in Budapest in 1956, it chronicles the events leading up to and following a brief anti-Soviet insurrection, and it particularly follows the career of her aunt's lover, Janos (Jan Nowicki) who was active in the uprising. ~ Clarke Fountain, All Movie Guide

When the director Marta Meszaros made her 1982 autobiographical feature Diary for My Children about her and her Hungarian family's sufferings in the Soviet Union during the Stalin era, it made Hungary's authorities so nervous that they withheld it from distribution for two years. After seeing that it caused no problems for them, they okayed this movie, which is a sequel featuring the same actors in the same roles. The first movie concentrated on the experiences Juli (her name in the film) has under the Stalin regime and her eventual return in 1949 to Hungary following the imprisonment of her sculptor father and the death of her mother. In this movie, the girl has been having a difficult time with her foster mother, and at eighteen is trying to find some way to expand her horizons. She also wants to see her father, who she believes is still in a Soviet prison. Juli receives a scholarship to study film in Moscow, which is just what she was looking for. There, she encounters Janos, a man who resembles her father and she becomes friends with him, but he is later rounded up and imprisoned for political reasons. Meanwhile, Juli has been commuting between her Hungarian home and Moscow, studying for her film degree and making her first film, a documentary. When Stalin dies, there is a political thaw and Janos is released from prison, at the same time she discovers that her father died in prison in 1944, but his name and reputation had been rehabilitated (that is, they were no longer in official disfavor). When her movie is finally made and released (amid criticism that it is "brutally" honest), she is about to receive her degree in Moscow when she learns of an uprising at home. She wants to return, but the borders have been sealed. ~ Clarke Fountain, All Movie Guide