We Were Young

Binka Zhelyazkova was born on July 15, 1923 in the town of Svilengrad, Bulgaria. She studied theater at the National Theater Institute in Sofia. For a brief time she also studied theater direction at VGIK, Moscow, with theater professor Lobanov. Upon graduation she began working as an assistant director at the National Film Studio in Sofia. Her career as a film director began in 1957 when she co-directed her first feature film Life Goes Quietly By… with her husband Hristo Ganev.

At the end of the 1950s Binka Zhelyazkova was one of the few women in the world making feature films. Her career developed during the period of socialist realism in Bulgarian cinema, which demanded the presentation of an idealized image of life as if it were a reality. This was to be done by means of simple plots and positive heroes. But hers was a counter-cinema to the accepted socialist realism, often challenging the restrictive rules set by the Communist ideological machine.

Binka Zhelyazkova’s style was influenced by Italian Neo-Realism and the French New Wave, as well as Russian Cinema. The poetic and metaphoric imagery of her films often prompted critics to compare her to Fellini and Tarkovski. Her distinctive directorial style along with her perfectionism and nonconformism won her the label, “the bad girl of Bulgarian cinema”.

During her career she directed seven feature and two documentary films. Four of her nine films were banned from distribution and reached audiences only after the end of communism. She was the director of the Bulgarian section of Women in Film, an organization created in 1989 after the international women in film conference, KIWI, in Tbilisi, Georgia. She stopped making films after 1989, which coincided with the fall of the communist regime in Bulgaria. For some time after that she remained active in the women in film organization but soon completely withdrew from public life. —binkadoc.com