Maya Vitkova, Director, screenwriter and producer, Viktoria.
Festival Section: Another View.
FRED meets filmmaker Maya Vitkova to talk about her wonderful film VIKTORIA, which was shown at the 49th Karlovy Vary International Film Festival.
Boryana is determined never to have a child in communist Bulgaria. She shares a small flat with her doctor husband and her mother, and dreams of escaping to the West. All the same, her daughter Viktoria enters the world in 1979, born without a belly button. Perhaps due to this physical defect, Viktoria is declared the country’s “Baby of the Decade” and, for the nine years preceding the fall of communism in Eastern Europe, she is pampered by the state and the Communist Party. The director doesn’t aim for realism; on the contrary, in her visually stylised, inventive and, at times, ironic piece, she credibly combines epic passages with intimate episodes testifying to the complex characters of the three heroines, and also to an era when it wasn’t easy to give and receive love. Told in three parts, the film deftly interweaves archive footage with a tale of the ambivalent relationships between women of three generations, set against the backdrop of the historical events w
hich had a huge impact on their lives. This talented director’s feature debut was screened in international competition at this year’s Sundance.
Reporter: Matt Micucci.