Doubt and Love in Binka Zhelyazkova’s We Were Young
Binka Zhelyazkova’s second feature with the melancholic title We Were Young (1961), takes place in the Sofia of the early 1940s during the Nazi occupation. A handful of youngsters, in their late teens and early twenties are willing to risk everything in order to oppose the fascists. Amidst the political chaos, a love story blooms between the newbie Veska (Rumyana Karabelova) and the seasoned partisan Dimo (Dimitar Buynozov). But the love story Binka is interested in is conditioned by political sacrifice and therefore, is bound to be tragic.
We Were Young, the follow-up to the banned debut Life Floats Quietly By (1957), brought Zhelyazkova domestic and international acclaim: top prizes in Bulgaria, Moscow, Cartagena, and Prague. Scripted by her partner and collaborator Hristo Ganev, the film is driven by idealism and uncompromising devotion, imbuing her characters with a sense of urgency and relentlessness.
The state-set directives were clear in regard to cinema: moving images should offer a picturesque reflection of the socialist ideal: lack of conflict was the norm, and all interpersonal relations should be smooth and with a positive ring. The characters should be morally idolised or immorally judged, easy to spot the good from the bad egg, and only the carriers of hyperbolised socialist values should be celebrated. However, Binka valued form and nuance. While We Were Young (as well as all of her films) is uncompromisingly leftist at their ideological core, she leaves room for character development and repentance. In expressing these ideas, she resorted to formalism, most significantly based on equal attention to all human faces in repetitive close-ups, without glamorisation or bourgeois aestheticism – all that set against a distinctively neorealist aesthetic.
In her working years, between 1951 and 1988, Binka Zhelyazkova was expected to abide by the rules set by an increasingly restrictive State Cinematography. Zhelyazkova herself was more curious to explore human doubt and vulnerability, her fickle female, such as Veska, protagonists the one beacon of hope for a hapless generation. It is the filmmaker’s firm stand on politics and ethics – which are never to be separated – that get to the core of the ambivalence of being Bulgarian under state socialism.
This luscious restoration was first shown in 2021’s Il Cinema Ritrovato and now meets UK audiences for the first time.
The text was originally published as programme notes for the Barbican Centre.