I agree with another reviewer that this is a masterpiece. I've never seen a movie by, for, and about women that was so powerful. The reviews for this film will probably come down along gender and/or religious lines. What I took away from this movie was the point that not all women want to have children and no amount of pressure from men, religion, family, or society can change that. When safe abortion was or is not available, many teenagers find themselves ill prepared physically, emotionally, or financially to care for a child since they are still children themselves. When illegal or haphazard abortion techniques are used, women die. So, it's important that children are expected and wanted. While it's very important that a child be loved, the person doing the nurturing doesn't have to be the mother.The lead actress poignantly portrayed the type of despair that women feel when their lives are predetermined by pregnancy, men, relatives, religion, politics, or society. You don't have to live in a repressive regime like Bulgaria to be a woman under stress to become a mother. That can (and does) happen everywhere in the world. In most societies, women suffer scorn and social ostracism if they don't want to get married and have children. Mostly, women don't have access to education or opportunity to do anything other than marry and reproduce. The female body seems to be viewed more as function.It was ironic that the Bulgarian politicos thought that a baby girl with no belly button was emblematic of the new age of communism. I wonder how they would have celebrated if it was a boy with no penis. Maybe that's a topic for another movie.

This is one of the stupidest and ugliest movies I've seen within the last 5 years and I feel very sad and ashamed of the fact it was produced in my country. I am not surprised it won some awards in USA. This guys are willing to give everything when they find even the smallest piece of anti-communist propaganda. I thought Bulgarian movie-making has already passed the time of that kind of cheap propaganda. The story is thin and meaningless and could be told in 10 min. It might be interesting to your friends or to your shrink, Mrs. Vitkova, but you have no right to torture the audience for 3 hours with it. Regarding the actors, almost all of them were excellent, especially Anastasia Ingilizova and Mariana Krumova, who were perfect as always. But why, the hell, did you think that your nieces Kalina and especially Daria had anything to do with acting? Not to mention that it was a real challenge for me and my friends (all natives from Bulgaria) to understand Daria talking in... Bulgarian. This child doesn't need a movie-shooting, she needs a medical treatment for her nose, her third tonsil or whatever her problem is. She can hardly speak and cannot close her mouth entirely, because she cannot breath through her nose at all. (But that's not the reason she is a bad actress, of course.) And in the end there was this scene with the totally naked dead grandma. It was ugly, awful and humiliating. You said, Mrs. Vitkova, that you based the film on what happened in your life. In this regard I have a question for you: Did you really hate your grandma so much, so you made this scene so disrespectful? During the whole film you tried to convince us that you cared for her, you began to love her... Please do not try to justify yourself with the intent of showing the Caesar scar. It could be done with some art contrivances, not porn ones.

I myself am a product of the same historic period and the country this film comes from.The late socialism has tormented our destinies in a much more perfidious way than the scriptwriter and her advisers have tried in vane in the most unlikely and very clumsy way to convince us.Too primitive with some post WWII mockery and far from make believe Coca Cola symbols which work fantastic in "Gods must be crazy " but is pitiful in this attempt for epic drama.Probably the filmmaker thought that in many hours (almost three hours) of torturing the audience with all versions of simple manipulations can give an idea of 45 years of communism.My personal advise to the rest of the viewers is skip the enormous effort of three endless hours of boredom for the sake of a good Russian film by great Michalkov.

Viktoria is an ambitious, fully conceived and developed first film. It portrays the lives of three multi-generational women connected to one another by little else than birth. Concurrently the journey mirrors the history of everyday life in Bulgaria under communism and after its fall. The muted color pallet of the film, the aesthetically stark cinematography is complimented by the music. The brevity of words between these women adds to their isolation from one another. The monotony of every-day life, the isolation, the lack of connection between mother and daughter, the absence of any hope but to escape one another, the wretchedness of life is thoroughly achieved.A beautiful and highly symbolic film of great beauty and quietness.