"Vchera" (Yesterday: the title refers both to the not so distant past of the late sixties, and to the Beatles' song of the same name: one of the most popular songs among the "progressive" youth in totalitarian Bulgaria) has been a rare success among Bulgarian audience for a number of reasons. One is that it depicts, in a rather amusing form (not all the puns and absurdities in the plot may be easily understandable to people who have not lived behind the Iron Curtain), one of the important clashes in communist countries: one between a youth which identified with a culture considered by the regime as dangerous and decadent, and the people who were charged to defend, and propagate, the values of communism among that same youth: old high school teachers with membership in the Communist Party. The screenwriter and the director, however, made a very successful decision: not to treat the clash from its "ideological" and "political" side, but just to confront the mentality of the two generations. It is not because they are fanatic Marxists that the teachers fight the aspirations of their students for more liberty (and more fun!): it is because it is personally difficult for them to acknowledge that what their own dreams of young people had been twenty years earlier is no longer relevant, out-of-date, old-fashioned, obsolete. "Vchera" is not about politics, it is about the change of generations and the change of values in general.
The movie was received with greatest enthusiasm by the generation which was the same age as the characters in the movie, and its exhilarating sincerity was due namely to the crew's nostalgia for their own "yesterday": by the time the movie was produced, 20 years later than the time when the plot was taking place, its authors were in the same situation as their "evil" teachers in the movie: confronted with new values and new uncertainties. The clearest expression of this was the "Oath Song" (Kletva) by the end of the movie: written by the most popular rock-band of the sixties, it is a kind of a belated, and obsolete, anthem of at least two generations of Bulgarian high-school students.
The movie was received with greatest enthusiasm by the generation which was the same age as the characters in the movie, and its exhilarating sincerity was due namely to the crew's nostalgia for their own "yesterday": by the time the movie was produced, 20 years later than the time when the plot was taking place, its authors were in the same situation as their "evil" teachers in the movie: confronted with new values and new uncertainties. The clearest expression of this was the "Oath Song" (Kletva) by the end of the movie: written by the most popular rock-band of the sixties, it is a kind of a belated, and obsolete, anthem of at least two generations of Bulgarian high-school students.
