Veselin Vulkov

A pair of rebellious high school students get thrown out of home and school, then drift from job to job. Bulgaria's submission for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film in 1990

A pretty woman, divorced mother of a child works as a secretary at a research institute. She is taking an external degree. It all looks quite normal. In fact, she experiences serious difficulties: she has a problem with her ex-husband, her child is going through difficult age, a sycophant at the institute is exerting pressure on her, and the jealous wife of her boss makes malicious reports against her. She is forced to fight for each breath and to violate even her own principles in order to survive.

A study in human psychology that uses five disparate characters from clearly defined social positions, this film offers as much insight into the society of a changing Bulgaria, as it does into the minds of individuals in conflict. The story centers around transporting a worker's corpse, in a truck, to the mountain village where he was born. In the truck is: a man who may be suffering from tuberculosis, and who has an unfaithful wife at home; a doctor (the intellectual); a bookkeeper worried over the salaries she pays out; a hermit picked up on the road; and the driver who is a rough-and-ready working-class symbol. The seeds for conflict are set both by the personalities of the five in the truck and by their social background. The director Christo Christov, acknowledges his debt to Henri-Georges Clouzot and the Wages of Fear, for inspiration in the treatment of human conflict, its development through a set storyline, and its resolution in each of the five cases.