Maya Vitkova’s eloquent, ambitious, emotionally committed drama Viktoria premiered at Sundance 10 years ago and more than deserves its UK streaming release now. This excellent film would be a striking accomplishment from anyone – and this was actually Vitkova’s debut. It feels fierce and urgent: tremendously designed, acted and shot. Viktoria is an intergenerational women’s story from Bulgaria both before and after the 1989 revolutions, a film that maybe in its absurdism, scepticism and slow-burn passion shows the influences of Romanian director Radu Jude, with whom Vitkova worked on short films. On TV, Vitkova produced an episode of Michael Palin’s BBC TV New Europe travel series, heading across the Balkans; Viktoria, interestingly, has an image of someone walking across the snow, only to be flicked over by a giant hand from the sky.
In Sofia, Bulgaria, in the low-morale 70s, a young woman called Boryana (Irmena Chichikova) is plotting her escape from the dreary Eastern bloc with her doctor husband Ivan (Dimo Dimov); she dreams of the US and has a cigarette lighter in the shape of the Statue of Liberty. Her disloyal views are very much not shared by her glowering mother Dima (Mariana Krumova) who is a diehard communist and cannot conceive of any existence other than submission to the (male) party power structure. When Boryana gets pregnant, she is horrified, and does everything she can to abort the child; she does not have the milk of maternal kindness in her. Milk is to be the film’s keynote image of frustration and discontent – along with the blood of the yearned-for miscarriage.
