“A Question of Dignity”: A Different Kind of War

Older people will remember that qualities such as honesty and decency were once considered noble virtues with which one could live a small but righteous life. That seems long ago and forgotten, at least in the world as created by the Bulgarian director Stephan Komandarev. In this world, only sheer greed, ruthlessness and unscrupulousness, cynicism and the naked fight (for survival) of everyone against everyone prevail. Many films from the post-socialist world show us that this image does not deviate too far from the vulgar capitalism that currently prevails in some Eastern European countries.

An extreme form of unscrupulousness is when older people are deprived of their hard-earned savings through pertinent fraud schemes. These fraudsters operate across Europe, usually come from Eastern Europe and do not spare their own compatriots.

Blaga Naumova also has to experience this. Blaga is a retired Bulgarian teacher in Shumen, a medium-sized city in Bulgaria, and an ideal representative of the virtues mentioned above. Furthermore, she embodies the type of teacher for whom children have fear-based respect. Cool, strict and aloof, she exemplifies the (self-)discipline that she once expected from her students. Now all she has left is the young Armenian Tanja, to whom she gives private language lessons for the naturalization test and who doesn’t let even the slightest mistake slip through without pity.

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Blaga doesn’t lose her iron self-control even when she falls victim to con artists. The sophistication with which the criminals operate is shown by the fact that they even get a woman as sharp and educated as Blaga to literally throw all her money out the window. This money was actually intended to dignify her husband, who had just died. This is going to be difficult now.

The negotiations with the cemetery employee are like a lesson in market economics. He mercilessly drives up the price for the desired grave site and portrays himself as a victim of the circumstances in which everyone has to see where they stay. As a religious woman, Blaga has no choice: according to the Orthodox rite, the deceased must be underground within 40 days so that the soul finds peace. As a now destitute woman, however, she doesn’t have many options for (re)procuring money. The police just shrug their shoulders, the bank employee from whom she unsuccessfully applies for a loan refers to her age in annoyance, just like potential “employers”.

It is an acting masterpiece to watch Eli Skorcheva as Blaga Naumova, who appears so unmoved from the outside, as she rushes through the city to somehow get some money, and in doing so, step by step, she reveals her old life, her values ​​and virtues has represented her lifelong, throws her overboard – and finally makes a radical decision: she no longer wants to be a victim and allow herself to be humiliated, and she also wants her money back. So all that remains is to become the perpetrator yourself.

The shocking thing is that this step seems absolutely logical. She has followed the rules all her life – only to end up as a beggar in her old age. In a world without scruples, in which dignity is only measured by how much money you have been able to amass, it is a failure not to have taken advantage of all the opportunities, even if they are criminal and cause suffering to other people as a result. “It’s a different kind of war here,” she explains to her language student when she talks about her experiences in her embattled homeland.

Eli Skorcheva was a big star in Bulgaria in the 80s and is now celebrating her big screen comeback after a 30-year absence with the leading role in “A Question of Dignity”. For director Stephan Komandarev it is the third film in his trilogy about the social conditions in contemporary Bulgaria. Whether the deeply pessimistic view of his homeland is justified or not, he has certainly touched a nerve.

In addition to the Grand Prix at the Karlovy Vary Film Festival, the film was submitted as Bulgaria’s entry for the foreign Oscars, like two of Komandarev’s previous films. This makes him the most important voice in Bulgarian film. “A question of dignity” is his reference to the older generation, which was hit hardest by the transition to a market economy. Many once educated and highly qualified academics now live on starvation pensions, which hardly ensure physical survival, let alone participation in social life. In any case, the raw numbers prove Komandarev’s depressing analysis right; Not only is Bulgaria the poorest country in the EU, but it has also lost a third of its total population through migration since the fall of communism. Those who cannot emigrate have to see where they stay. As is well known, being determines consciousness, and the loss of the moral compass is the inevitable consequence.

From now on, Blaga serves as a “mule,” as the couriers are called, to those who have just robbed them. She stoically takes the money that other people are now throwing out the window and is amazed at the fact that a single delivery job earns her more than her monthly pension. Something like this is called a justice gap, and she is now closing it in her own way. She accepts the abandonment of her previous civil existence; For Blaga, there can no longer be a way out of the (moral) dilemma that she is increasingly finding herself in.

You can’t blame her, and so the viewer is torn between empathy for the deceived and his own sense of justice in view of the fact that others are now becoming victims with her help. The bitterly evil, even cynical ending of the film creates disturbance, and that is one of the best things that art can or should cause.

With his films, Komandarev joins the tradition of the “cinema of moral unrest”. This term was once established for Kieślowski’s early Polish films. This meant films that got to the skin of reality until it scratched, that wanted to know what responsibility is and how an individual faces this responsibility. The fact that these ethical questions characterize many films from Eastern Europe to this day can certainly be derived from this cinematic tradition.

»Eine Frage der Würde«, Bulgarien/Deutschland 2023. Regie: Stephan Komandarev, Buch: Stephan Komandarev, Simeon Ventsislavov. Mit: Eli Skorcheva, Gerasim Georgiev, Rozalia Abgarian, Ivan Barnev, Stefan Denolyubov, Ivaylo Hristov. 114 min. Jetzt im Kino.

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