AGLAYA

In hope of a better life, the Hungarian-Romanian family of circus artists escapes from the Ceausescu dictatorship in Romania to the West in the early 1980s. Once there, however, if they want to stay in the ring they have to come up with something exotic. The mother devises a special act: she hangs by her hair from the circus dome. Her daughter Aglaya becomes terribly worried that her mother will fall to her death, and this fear becomes an everyday burden for her to bear. Yet one day – following family tradition – she herself becomes “The Woman with Hair of Steel.” The story is about the members of a refugee family of circus artists, their enforced interdependence, their eventual break-up, and the joy and curse of belonging together, as seen from the viewpoint of young Aglaya.