Árvácska

This movie is based on a true story. The novel was written by Zsigmond Móricz in 1941. He found a 10 years old little girl standing on the edge of the bridge of liberty in the downtown of Budapest. The little orphan wanted to be suicide. The writer took her with himself and treated her in the rest of his life as if the girl were his own daughter. The little orphan was talking a lot about her cruel life which inspired Móricz to write the novel this movie is based on. The story the girl told was more or less the same that can be seen on this movie... Dalkó Diána (ddioda@hotmail.com) above here describes it very well I think.

I have read the novels by Zsigmond Moricz about Transylvania because I was born there but not this one, his last. As other reviews pointed out, he adapted the life story of a girl he had saved from suicide at age ten, which may explain the extraordinary realism of an abused child's viewpoint. The film does a very good job to convey this, everything is seen through young Csöre's eyes, and the viewer is confronted with her emotions going through all this. There is no questioning on her own of her nudity or her abuse because she is too young to understand the reasons why this is happening to her, she can only respond with feelings.

Her only focus throughout the latter part of the film is finding her real mother, who tried to pick her up (she believes) from the orphanage where she was abandoned, but who was claimed by the greedy uncaring foster mother instead who had the gall to exclaim "Some people pretend anything to make money". It is her instead who uses the government grant on her own children and makes the orphan sleep on hay. When Csöre encounters a school, she does not know why the children sing numbers. When the foster mother's older relative or former lover (this is unclear) takes her to church, she keeps asking questions because she's never been before. All she knows is the farm and the hope of being reunited with her real mom, and when that is taken away from her, she finally acts.

There are some reviews which take issue with her running around naked for the first third of the film since that could entice pedophiles. Seriously? The first scene has her being picked up by a stranger who says "I'm going to eat you all up". And when she gets home late and cowers in a corner, the foster mom says to her children "Don't bother her, her bum hurts". And in bed, they tell each other "Pista did, the pig. Damn it!". And the next morning, they continue torturing the little girl. For the life of me, I cannot imagine anything "enticing" about this.

You will either love or hate this film. Either you will take this as a much more poignant and fitting critique of the times it's been set in than the fake realism of the Dardenne Brothers. Or you will think it's going way too far and is downright unbearable to watch - because you don't know that part of the world. In Transylvania, one of our most famous fairy tales is "The Goat with Three Kids", and English speakers have asked me sometimes why it is so incredibly brutal, way more graphic than Grimm's Tales. And I answered that fairy tales are cautionary tales, and our country is wide and empty and dangerous for children without care.

In our world it is often children who suffer most egregiously when poverty claims a land.

French fairy tales of children being abandoned in woods when poor families could no longer feed themselves are based on true examples of abandonment. Examples exist from England and nearly every other country with written histories and where impoverishment has claimed lives and yes, when such conditions have eaten away the veneer of humanity, personal values, and selflessness.

Nobody's Daughter explores the depths of one such suffering child. This Hungarian movie graphically portrays the brutal cruelty of people in her life who were in their own battered way, considered otherwise good.

Zsuzsa Czinkóczi portrayed 6 year old Csöre as a nude child orphaned by circumstances. Her acting was a superb testament inasmuch as she is a child herself of course, and by even limited imagination we can hope that any other child impoverished or not may have some equal gift to offer mankind, if only given the chance.

Csöre in the film is viciously raped by a large man, grotesquely burned by other callous adults who occasionally feed her, later savagely beat by a foster mother and ... well, there is more but it's not my goal here to recant the movie in it's entirety, only to suggest to those caring viewers who are interested in reality as it existed in recent history, and in reality as it exists in other parts of today's 'modern' world, this film will provide you with much food for thought. It has me. My family and I were nearly in tears, breathless at the savage indifference to Csöre's personal feelings and physical tortures of her day-to-day's existence.

Nobody's Daughter is not about as one other reviewer said, "a nude girl running about...", for that is only the typical hypocrite knee-jerk utterance, or the pretentious puritan's silly thoughtless whisper, or a shallow view from a cretin's perspective.

Nay, this film should be recommended viewing for people embracing the idea of foster parenting, or for social workers in any country on earth, and for United Nations personnel who deal with the occurrence of poverty-based neglect of Earth's most valuable resource...our children.

Finally the moral Nobody's Daughter should graphically indicate to us all is that to abandon or neglect even one child on this planet is to abandon our hopes and dreams entirely.

Anyone who is not familiar with the hungarian reality of 1920-40's, can not imagine what the essence of this movie is. So, even if you are not Hungarian, but want to see the movie, and additionally would like to understand it, you have to be open; you should know that different parts of the world have different histories, they have other spirits, and they could suffer and be glad in different ways than you.

This film is an excellent adaptation of a masterpiece novel by Móricz Zsigmond. We can see the background of that age through Csöre's life, which only was a small part of the system, but her little impulsive existence carry the whole Hungarian reality in the 20-30's. Anyone who doesn't know what it means to run among the sharp corn leaves naked as Csöre did on the very first moment of the film, can stop watching the movie, because it is pointless.

Czinkóczi Zsuzsa, who played the part of Csöre, recieved the main award of a child film festival. The director, Ranódy László, won the Hungarian Film Critics' award.

The film was often shown on TV when I was a child, but I was unable to watch it. I was always sick from it (it is very depressing for a child under 10 years old.)

That's how the era really was. And there are still such things today, the life of those brought up in the institution is never easy, even today it may happen that the foster parent actually takes him in as a slave. It is not as common as it was then (so remember, there was no contraception, 5-10 children per household, great love was not the point)

To ayeshakhattak-42704

It's hungarian, use google translate: cultura.hu/kultura/moricz-es-csibe-tortenete/

On the surface, they functioned as a father-daughter duo, with time he also took the girl's name as Móricz, but in fact Csibe was the writer's last great love.

They also have a child.

"Finally, at the age of almost 60, he met Erzsébet Littkey, Csibe, who was 40 years younger than him. Their first meeting was decisive in itself. Csibe was about to jump off a bridge when Móricz saw him and saved him from suicide. He then took her in, and although his plan for his last years was to live in retirement in Leányfalu, in the end he made more than 1,500 pages of notes about Csibe's miserable life, and in addition to several short stories, he also inspired Árvácska.

On the surface, they functioned as a father-daughter duo, with time he also took the girl's name as Móricz, but in fact Csibe was the writer's last great love."