All I can say about Angi Vera is that it has everything one can ask for in a film of this sort: vividly portrayed characters, historical accuracy and moral seriousness.
While the nascent Soviet-imposed regime is shown in all of its horror, its characters are shown in full, without simplistic caricature, especially Angi Vera's apparatchik patron, whose background in the resistance to the Nazis just a few years earlier is given full expression. The period details are perfect, right down to the music on the gramophone. The lines spoken by the training school leaders consistently mimic the jargon to perfection: "If you are not going forward, you are going backward," etc., etc.
The climactic scene where Angi Vera faces her former lover in one of those infamous self-criticism sessions is a scene that I'll take with me forever---the look on her face when she is reminded of the truth of their relationship, followed by the immediate recognition of the reality of the cross-examination she is undergoing, the hardening of the lines on her face, and the subsequent (and instant) abandonment of her better self---precisely the purpose of the session. All done within a few minutes, but those few minutes capture to perfection the essence of every "People's Democracy" in Eastern and Central Europe. As does the entire film.
And the ending---understated but utterly horrifying in its implications. That this film could have been made in Hungary in the late 1970's was one of the surest signs that Communism was soon to be on the way out. I couldn't possibly recommend a movie more strongly than Angi Vera.
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