1973 | Bulgarian with English subtitles | 118 minutes

In the 1970s, Binka Zhelyazkova, a relatively unknown director until that point due to the communist Bulgarian government's strict censorship, found her work finally gaining wider international recognition. Her film,The Last Word (1973), selected for the Cannes Film Festival’s competition, tells the stories of six female political prisoners during WWII waiting to be led to death row, boldly questioning the meaning of physical survival and the price of compromising with personal beliefs and dignity – a theme that permeates Zhelyazkova's entire filmography.

Hope, optimism, trust, martyrdom, expediency and the possibility of linear time while  living under repression are weaved into both classroom and prison cell debates between the six women. In these moments of siege from all sides - whether it be living under a fascist regime or foreign occupation - little room remains for either melancholic nostalgia for a lost past or resigned ambivalence about the future.

The film's anti-fascist focus is staged during the war, during which the six political prisoners are imprisoned for their resistance to the ruling Bulgarian monarchy and its allied Nazi forces. But the film regularly flashes between 'then' and 'now',  often cutting  to the 1970s, where we witness Bulgarian socialist youth celebrating the six prisoners' memory. Zhelyazkova's film's anti-fascist camouflage manages to make its way past Bulgarian state censors, but its message also manages to pick at the growing gap between the lofty ideals of Eastern Bloc socialist states and the corruption and crack down on freedom of speech that tarnished such utopian projects.

Fast-paced editing and distortion combine with seemingly absurd performance to erect a landmark film on the collective experience of awaiting death with no timeline, pierced by ephemeral moments of solidarity under the most impossible of conditions.

Part of our series UNEXPECTED SOLIDARITIES.

"I will paint him the whole world... so that he will see it all colorful and gay."

*התשלום לאירוע במתכונת שלם.י כפי יכולתך כאשר כל ההכנסות תרומה למערך סלי המזון של תרבות של סולידריות.
*תתאפשר כניסה של 18+ בקניית כרטיסים מראש. קניית כרטיס בכניסה תתאפשר ל23+/21+ בהתאם להנחיות הבית רומנו.
*בבית של סולידריות אין מקום להתנהגות גזענית, טרנספובית, סקסיסטית והטרדות/אלימות מכל סוג.
*ישנו מעלון המהווה הסדר נגישות לבית של סולידריות, אנא צרו איתנו קשר מראש לתיאום גישה עבור נכים.