Nobody's Daughter

Nobody's Daughter is a postscript to the retrospective dedicated to Judit Elek during IFFR 2023. It's fitting that it was the only film not restored in time for the festival. Nobody's Daughter remains Elek's sole work for which she wrote only a screenplay and did not direct the film. Elek refers to the 70s as her Silentium period: she was blacklisted and forbidden to direct fiction features for almost the entire decade.

The Nobody's Daughter project fits in this in-betweenness. On the surface, it's an adaptation of a Hungarian literary classic detailing the sufferings of an orphan at the hands of her new parents. Turned into an autobiographical piece by Elek, it’s a clef through which she talks about the year she found herself as a nameless, powerless servant girl on a farm whose owners worked her mercilessly. This year of constant humiliation and backbreaking slog was, as described by Elek, worse for her than the Holocaust, as here she was all alone.

When rereading the novel in preparation for the script work, Elek was also surprised that she didn't have to change too much, merely add a few incidents and details, as the classic already knew the essence of all her sorrows.

– Olaf Möller