Urotcite na Blaga
Blaga is a seventy-year-old recently widowed former teacher and a woman of firm morals. When telephone scammers con her out of the money that she had saved for her husband’s grave, her moral compass slowly begins to lose its bearings… Stephan Komandarev’s past films have systematically criticized the inauspicious social situation in post-communist Bulgaria, and Blaga’s Lessons is no different. In this evocative drama Komandarev aims his lens at the lives of today’s senior citizens – a vulnerable group whom politicians so often promise the right to a dignified life… but reality is much different. (Festival information)
As if that weren't enough, a 70-year-old widow literally throws her money over the balcony into the hands of scammers who pressured her over the phone. The woman now also lacks the urgently needed money to finance the tomb for her recently deceased husband and herself. She, who has fought hard all her life, does not lose sight of this goal and in the process becomes a perpetrator herself: in a criminal way, she inflicts what she has experienced on others. Until the very last minute of the film, we viewers believe that the protagonist is experiencing a cathartic moment and regrets her actions. But Blaga remains true to her strong beliefs and seems to have no choice but to act immorally. The fate of that woman reflects the plight of older people in post-communist or market-economy-capitalist Bulgaria, who often no longer know who they can rely on between their struggle for survival, corruption and exploitation. This is exacerbated by a religiously motivated fear for her husband's salvation. This film convinced the jury because it tells the relationship between individual responsibility and social norms with a poignancy that makes it difficult for us to feel sympathy for the protagonist, played outstandingly by Eli Skorcheva, and yet makes us want to ask if we would act like her.