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VIKTORIA is a very rare kind of film, one that is centered on the feelings of bearing a woman's body--of the physical as well as emotional inwardness of women's lives--and that also depicts the vast national and even world-historical stage that renders it at once real and mythic, far beyond reach and all-too-present. It's a long film--two and a half hours; it has an elaborate and intricate plot that's full of twists and details so sharply observed and cleverly realized that all of them seem like spoilers, looking back from the ultimate dramatic resolution to the premise with which the action starts, in the first dramatic scene. The very description of the plot shines with the film's ingenuity and emotional intensity. It's a passionately realistic story that details the daily lives of its characters but is based on wondrous flights of fantasy that Vitkova realizes by means of simple yet gleefully audacious special effects. For all its basis in political and historical frustrations and affirmations, VIKTORIA is an exquisitely stylized film, with precisely composed and timed images of a delicate and involute whimsy that stifles howls of rage and derision, quiet and terse dialogue that distills lifelong passions and longings in the lacerating undertones of simple phrases that glint like blades catching sunlight...It's as if VIKTORIA were filmed in the grammatical feminine; it's one of the great recent films by a woman about women, and it casts Vitkova to the forefront of contemporary filmmakers. Her inventiveness, her confessional and technical audacity, her emotional and historical insight, the unity of her dramatic and aesthetic sensibilities, make the film a treasure of the current cinema. All the more astonishingly, it's Vitkova s first feature; all the more dismayingly, it has been sitting on the shelf for two years, after premiring at Sundance in 2014. It's the first Bulgarian film to be shown at Sundance and one of the few Bulgarian films to be shown in the United States at all. It may take a movie industry to give rise to a movie artist, but it takes one great director to press ahead and open the artistic spaces in which other filmmakers can let their own imagination run free. On the basis of Viktoria alone, the Bulgarian cinema has a bright future. --Richard Brody, THE NEW YORKERA strikingly assured and ambitious feature debut...plenty of dryly absurdist Eastern European humor... an arresting mix of satire, surrealism and ambivalently angsty drama, with the helmer in precocious full command of pacing, tone and aesthetics... VIKTORIA heralds such a fascinating filmic sensibility that one eagerly looks forward to whatever Vitkova does next. --Dennis Harvey, VARIETY

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