The Tied Up Balloon is an astonishing, thrilling piece of work. Buoyed by the liberatory power of cinema, it's at once absurd and profound; beautiful and ridiculous; joyful and devastating. Above all, there's a glorious sense of freedom that runs through the film, despite it being made by a woman, in a country under that banned the movie virtually the moment it was released, for being "a mockery of man, of ... human and national dignity, of the historical traditions and the heroic struggles of the Bulgarian nation."

It's a movie about a barrage balloon, and about the men who want to capture it. Men who are comic and stupid, but also innocent and loving. Men who fall in a…

“They had tied me to the war, but I cut the ropes, and now I’m free!” Surely among the great free-floating (this time, literally) metaphors in Eastern European film history; the balloon’s whale-like trace of a serene smile even uncannily anticipates the depressed leviathan of Tarr’s Werckmeister Harmonies. While the powers that be announce the imposition of standardized time, and war wages on beyond the horizon, the villagers come to be mesmerized by the balloon’s arrival up above their lives as the harbinger of so many liberatory dreams of actual material improvement. “My god, imagine how many shirts and underwear are up there!” An absurdist, relentlessly chaotic carnivalesque as they all chase so many competing interpretations of this inexplicable arrival…

March Around the World 2022 - Bulgaria 🇧🇬 - 20/30

Last night I enjoyed a film about a hydrogen balloon and tonight it was time to upscale my affections towards a barrage balloon. The balloon in question looks something like a floating whale. It’s like a thing Miyazaki might have dreamt up, which made me wonder if he cut his teeth imagining scenarios for 1967 Bulgarian satires. Or maybe this was the comedy inspiration for Werckmeister Harmonies that Bela Tarr was striving to emulate, but which ended in misery. I’m joking of course, but I do genuinely think this is a great film and that it could have been the inspiration for many others if it hadn’t been so ruthlessly…

If you ask me, we are the monkeys here. 

At the heart of the ridiculous, the sublime.

A master at work, Binka Zhelyaskova’s third film throws out answers to questions never posed and disregards any you might be left with. 

Some allegories and critiques seem clear from this cultural remove, but others are surely beyond me. And for all the veiled-but-barbed critiques (or donkey that almost went the way of Las Hurdes) there is an innocence to the action. 

Her visions feels sure throughout this rabble’s ramble after a military balloon. The style— marked by occasional quotes— gives events a storybook feel. The wild camerawork and unusual characters they meet give it a magical one. 

It’s been a while since…

A silver WWII barrage balloon drifts whale-like over an uncomprehending Bulgarian village. Terror, paranoia, wonder, greed, and mirth follow in short order, as a group of men sets out in quixotic fashion to bring it down, if only for the endless shirts and underwear that might be produced from its silk skin. Over the course of their pursuit, this stupid little band enacts the larger madnesses of the world in surreal microcosm—a Soviet monument to jackassery is constructed and a ridiculous war is fought—but the fun doesn’t really stop until the real soldiers show up and assert control. The reasons each man invents as to why he chose to follow the balloon are irrelevant, all are given the same punishment.…

March around the World Day 4 - Bulgaria

From one absurdist film to another, although this time, we find ourselves in the hinterlands of communist Bulgaria. The Tied-up Balloon is essentially about a herd of Bulgarian countrymen chasing around a suspiciously whale-shaped balloon until they get harangued by the local police. The balloon itself hearkens to the leviathan -- a whale-like creature in The Book of Job and a monarchist treatise by Thomas Hobbes -- in that it looms large over the people's lives (despite Bulgaria being fully communist by then, the characters still mention the tsar) until it gets torn asunder by the state. Lots of subtle communist/anti-communist imagery here, but even if you're not fond of politics, there…

A somewhat puzzling, darkly humoristic allegory about freedom and oppression, very much in the vein of Zhelyazkova's other work I've seen, The Last Word set in women's prison. According to IMDB, it was banned as "too cryptic" and I'm sure many meanings can be attached to a giant balloon that suddenly appears over a Bulgarian village and makes villagers interested in following it.

Even if I don't "get" the film per se, there is something very fascinating about this endless journey that can lead to pretty much anywhere. These villagers remind me a bit of a Finnish tale called "Hölmöläiset" which saw country people as goofy and weird in their customs but I don't think Zhelyazkova's ulterior motive is malicious…

“A donkey could never become a member of Europe.”

A playful comedy, rich with learned quotes, about the way groups of men are little different from packs of dogs—barking, howling, chasing after things, picking fights with each other and with other packs, often scary, always hairy, always ridiculous, though occasionally you catch glimpses of individual warmth and sweetness, and there are always going to be a bigger, badder pack that makes other packs look like pups. Made me laugh a few times—for example, when two rival groups of men meet and start extremely culturally-specific hurling insults at each other (“You shave the back of your necks only when it’s time for the fair!”), or when we’re shown an actual pack…

Close to being one of my personal favorites of all time, this since lockdown, a Bressonian fantasy (hey! a donkey's featured here too!) from Bulgaria's first woman director, might be the equivalent of "Au Hasard Balthazar" by way of Melville's 'Moby Dick', where the white whale is a zeppelin, a mixture of slacker Marxist philosophy and environmental installation art from Damien Hirst or Christo, where the simple innocence of childhood and donkey-dom is in pure contrast to a cynical village forever chasing the contours of a breezy air oyster.
Where "Andrei Rublev"'s balloon popped on its way to meet God, here, the balloon is forever stuck in a hellish landscape full of shouty Bulgarians.

In which a mysterious zeppelin (or…

Glorious moviemaking from Binka Zhelyazkova.

A large balloon appears above a Bulgarian village and the town's menfolk become obsessed with capturing it for its silk. And also because it's theirs now that it's hovering over their town. (The womenfolk are more concerned it's spying on them.) They run into many difficulties including a rival group of ragtag men who claim it's theirs.

They make stupid choices, like beating their way through a forest when a boy on a donkey simply takes the parallel road. And inexplicable choices. Leave the donkey alone! (According to Wikipedia, it was the donkey lifting shown in the poster that got the film banned in Bulgaria.) And I didn't understand the woman on the run. I…

Binka Zhelyazkova's The Tied Up Balloon is about the residents of a village in rural Bulgaria going crazy on the sudden arrival of a big whale-shaped Hydrogen balloon in their village and the story then follows how those people, particularly men of the village, try to seize the balloon, primarily to decipher what actually it is and then when they assume it's made of silk, their singular motive becomes to use its fabric and sew new clothes for themselves. What follows this initial development in narrative is a spectacular journey of those peasant men fighting with their neighbouring community, riding donkeys to seize the balloon, taking shelter under the balloon and many more activities full of absurdity which is bound…