Life Flows Slowly By…

This first feature film by Binka Jeliaskova was made alongside her husband, the screenwriter of many of her works, and focuses on a group of young revolutionaries who witness the death of a comrade at the hands of the Nazi army. Years later, in a country now devastated by unemployment and poverty, one of the survivors, a member of Parliament, decides to erect a statue of his fallen friend. When he finds himself surrounded by critics, he begins a purge. A film, banned for 33 years by the Bulgarian Communist Party, that anticipated Polish protest films, the Czech New Wave and inaugurated the exposure of state totalitarianism that marked the bankruptcy of communism in the Eastern Bloc.