A Nazi-era boarding school where teenage girls weaponize hymnals and pettiness. God help them all.
Season 1 • Episode 4
LatestGina’s love, Lieutenant Kuncz, secretly shows up at the institution and tells the girl to run away to see her father who is ill. Gina doesn’t recognize the real intentions of the handsome soldier, but luckily Abigel is on the lookout. It becomes clear that the girl is not safe, so the opponents come up with a bold plan in which Abigel is also revealed.
The story takes place during World War II. Vitay Georgina is enrolled by her father, General Vitay, in the completely closed, residential Calvinist Matula Girls' Institute in the town of Árkod, on the outskirts of the country. He does not tell Gina why, as her new classmates would accept her, but after she fights with them over a silly game and betrays them, she is ostracised.
Acting
Éva Szerencsi's face does three wars' worth of damage.
Production
The institute feels genuinely suffocating — production design as psychological warfare.
Creator
Éva Zsurzs
Trivia, insights & behind the scenes
Adapted from Magda Szabó's beloved novel, this was state television's prestige event — Hungary processing its war trauma through the bodies of teenage girls.
Éva Zsurzs was one of few women directing Hungarian television in the 1970s; she shot the institute sequences in an actual functioning Calvinist school, with real students as extras.
HU
