Reminder: Bulgarian Cinema Event on Binka Zhelyazkova, March 11, Tuesday, 7 pm, 2040 VLS Building, UC Berkeley

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Binka: To Tell a Story about Silence (2006)

directed by Elka Nikolova

film screening followed by Q&A with the director

The Attached Balloon (1967)

directed by Binka Zhelyazkova

Tuesday, March 11, 2008, 2040 Valley Life Sciences Building, 7 pm, free admission

Filmmaker Elka Nikolova is a native of Bulgaria.  In 1994, after completing her MA in psychology at Sofia University “Kliment Okhridski,” she moved to New York to study at the New School for Social Research where she concentrated in film production (MA, Media Studies 2001).  Following her interests in human rights and the contribution of women to the arts, Nikolova began researching the life and work of Binka Zhelyazkova.  While working in the NY film industry and currently at Dateline, NBC, she completed the production of “Binka: To Tell a Story About Silence,” a documentary about the controversial filmmaker Binka Zhelyazkova, the first female Bulgarian director and one of the few women anywhere making feature films in the late 1950s.

This screening will be followed by a film by Binka Zhelyazkova, “The Attached Balloon” (1967), a rarely-seen Zhelyazkova film that was banned by the Bulgarian government shortly after opening to great acclaim in 1967.  In Zhelyazkova’s imaginative, touching, and funny film, a lost war-balloon threatens and entices the peasants of a magically reinvented Bulgarian village during the Second World War.  Hoping to capture and tame the floating beast, the wild peasants chase the balloon in a carnivalesque, irrational pursuit over twelve hours.  With her refined, bitterly satirical, and visually stunning cinematography, Zhelyazkova seems to explore the boundaries of artistic, political, and social freedom by flaunting the inscrutable meaning of the villagers’ adventures.

Binka: To Tell a Story About Silence, Director: Elka Nikolova, 2006, 48 min, Color

The Attached Balloon, Director: Binka Zhelyazkova, 1967, 90 min, B&W

Co-sponsored by the Institute of Slavic, East European & Eurasian Studies, the Consortium for the Arts, and the Departments of Comparative Literature and Slavic Languages & Literatures.

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