The Budapest Diary tells the story of eleven-year-old Irek and his mother, Hanna, who arrive in the Hungarian capital in the winter of 1981 as part of a group trip. This journey becomes a turning point in the lives of both of them: Hanna doesn’t tell her son that she’s trying to find a way out of her broken marriage, and Irek here, in the free west, first experiences adolescent longing and embarks on the bumpy road to adulthood.