Sleeping babies. Some are crying, others are startled by doors closing. The corridors and the stairs of the women’s prison in Sliven. In addition to the adult inmates, there are also seventeen babies—innocent, not convicted. What good can come to the eyes and ears of a newborn in a prison? The stories of mothers who were pregnant when sent to prison, or who gave birth there (more precisely, in the Sliven hospital), and whose children are being raised in the prison nursery. The closing caption: ‘The film was created with the cooperation of the management of the Sliven Hospital and the inmates of the same prison.’

BINKA ZHELIAZKOVA (1923–2011) graduated in Theatre Direction from the Krastyo Sarafov Higher Institute of Theatre Art in Sofia in 1951. She began working as an assistant director at the Boyana Film Studios before directing her first feature, ‘Life Flows Quietly By… ’ (1957), filmed together with her husband, screenwriter Hristo Ganev. Zhelyazkova’s filmography includes seven feature and two documentary films. Four of her nine films were banned by Communist censorship and reached audiences only in 1988. She became the director of the Bulgarian section of WIFTI (Women in Film and Television International, an organisation established in 1989 in Tbilisi). After the fall of the Communist regime in Bulgaria in 1989, Binka Zhelyazkova stopped making films. In 1996, she was announced as ‘the face of cinema’ in Eastern Europe.