29/05/2015 - Maya Vitkova’s debut feature will be released via Big World Pictures

One of the best-received Bulgarian features of 2014, Viktoria [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Maya Vitkova
film profile], will again meet North American audiences after being the first Bulgarian film ever selected in competition at Sundance. Maya Vitkova’s family drama has been picked up for US release by Brooklyn-based distributor Big World Pictures. The film will continue its run on the festival circuit in 2015 and will be released in the US in January 2016.

In a press release, Big World’s director of acquisitions, Jonathan Howell, praised the film as “both very personal and universal, demonstrating a precocious command of all elements of the filmmaking process. Especially impressive is the film’s visual sensibility and its command of a range of shifting tones, from absurdist humour to political allegory to deeply moving familial drama.” 

Viktoria follows three generations of women in the final years of the People’s Republic of Bulgaria and the early years of the new government, focusing on reluctant mother Boryana and her daughter, Viktoria, who in one of the film’s surreal, magical touches is born without an umbilical cord. Though unwanted by her mother, Viktoria is named the country’s Baby of the Decade, and is showered with gifts and attention until the disintegration of the Eastern Bloc. But can political collapse and the hardship of new times finally bring Viktoria and her reluctant mother closer together?

The film was written and directed by Maya Vitkova, and was produced through her own production company, Viktoria Films. Mandragora (Romania) was the co-production company. The movie is handled internationally by Viktoria World Sales and Distribution.