In contrast, in Central European film-making, the Sixties did arrive, and there was a tolerated (though not at all liked) beatnik-semi-hippie counter-culture.

The apparently 'glamorous' plot of Intergirl reminds me of the regime's contradictory policy on prostitution at the end of the eighties: it was mostly suppressed, but the few prostitutes who were tolerated in specific areas were also 'employed' as 'hosts' of foreign state visitors (and later any convertible-currency-paying Western hotel guests), which also meant secret service connections.

BTW, the Intergirl of Hungary was the 1989 movie K, a not at all glamorous documentary about these 'privileged' prostitutes. (I haven't seen it, I only heard from an acquaintance who went to see it believing it to be a sex film, then was disgusted to the extent that he left half-way.)

_{*Lunatic*, n.
One whose delusions are out of fashion.}

Here we go again with the ideologic clichés and oversimplifications about the "Eastern Europe repressive climate"... You cannot lump together highly religious cultures like Poland, or with historically documented sexual repression like Russia with the relatively agnostic and more tolerant societies like Bulgaria, which was otherwise a staunch ally of the USSR. What definitely did not exist prior the Perestroika was the bourgeois fixation on sexuality and sexualisation of daily life; and the manic desire to control it. In fact some Eastern Block countries like Bulgaria were much more tolerant to sexuality than the Anglo-Saxon countries, which were - and still are - the most repressive in the developed world.