Nine Months (1976) d. Martha Mészáros • F-SIDES Cineclub Timișoara Screening

For this film, the writer Gabriela Adameșteanu proposes as a response a text that can be read on Scena9 in the following period and heard before the screening in the cinema hall.

When Juli (Lili Monori) takes a job at a metallurgical plant in a small provincial town, her boss, János (Jan Nowicki), starts courting her insistently and eventually gets her involved in a relationship with him. Left with no choice, she tries to at least keep her private space and professional ambitions intact, but his rudeness soon demands that he know and master everything.

János' fantasy about Juli as a simple future mother and wife dissolves when he comes into contact with a reality that does not obey his rules. Along with this, his image as a positive hero of socialist realism, forged in the tireless smelters of the homeland, rusts – succinctly reproduced in the credits in an apparent gesture of aesthetic-ideological conformity that Mészáros will continue to weaken later.

A favorite theme in the filmmaker's filmography, motherhood (and its absence or free living, outside of conventions) is here the background that erodes the idea of ​​the patriarchal family and the models of masculinity idealized in Soviet-influenced art.

Following the failure of romance as a life project and the symbolic route from the factory back to the delivery room, Márta Mészáros's realist study reaffirms its protagonist at every step as the sole rightful owner of her decisions. Even if it is present throughout the film as a fluid aesthetic brand, the actual slide into documentary territory comes as a great surprise - with the effect of silencing and amplifying the woman's autonomy to the point of absolute certainty.

The project is part of the national cultural programme "Timișoara – European Capital of Culture in 2023" and is funded through the Grow Timișoara 2023 programme, implemented by the Center for Projects Timișoara, with funds allocated from the state budget, through the budget of the Ministry of Culture.

Organised in partnership with the Municipality of Timișoara through the Project Centre.

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F-Sides Cineclub Timișoara

F-Sides Cineclub Timișoara