The film that placed Márta Mészáros' name within the international film circuit, Adoption was (and continues to be) a profoundly disruptive film. Breaking all taboos on issues of female emancipation (from extramarital sex to access to work), this is an intimate and seductive portrait of two generations of women struggling against a bureaucratic and patriarchal social system. A worker who dreams of being a mother (single and independent), and an institutionalised young woman who sees marriage as the only way to escape the shackles of state and family.
Adoption won the Golden Bear for best film at the 1975 Berlin Film Festival. A new digital restoration of the film will be screened, in 4K.