site.btaThree Films by Bulgarian Director Binka Zhelyazkova to Be Shown in London

Three Bulgarian films by film director Binka Zhelyazkova (1923-2011) will be screened in London in September, the Bulgarians in London website reported. The three films are The Attached Balloon (1967), We Were Young (1961) and The Swimming Pool (1977). The films are scheduled to be shown on September 13 (The Attached Balloon), September 17 (We Were Young), and September 27 (The Swimming Pool).

The films will be projected at the Barbican Centre, which is a performing arts centre in the Barbican Estate of the City of London and the largest of its kind in Europe. The idea to screen the Bulgarian films there belongs to Teodosia Dobriyanova and Savina Petkova, who work and live in the UK.

Teodosia said that Binka Zhelyazkova is the first female director of feature films in Bulgaria. She worked from the 1950s until the 1980s. In times when socialist realism was the aesthetic norms in Bulgarian art and directors were restricted in their choice of characters and storylines, Binka Zhelyazkova and her husband and screenwriter Hristo Ganev told complex stories about people of complex nature who often live in a totalitarian reality. Many of her films reached the broader audience only after 1989, when the communist totalitarian regimes in Eastern Europe collapsed.