An active member of the anti-fascist youth movement during World War II, she soon became disillusioned with the post-war realities, which had little to do with her ideals.
After its success at the 1967 Expo in Montreal the film was seen as an insult to the party leader, when in one of the scenes a group of villagers lift a donkey in the air.
Since 2007 renewed interest has arisen in Zhelyazkova's work mainly due to the documentary Binka: To Tell a Story About Silence by the New York based Bulgarian film maker Elka Nikolova.
Her distinctive directorial style along with her perfectionism and nonconformism won her the label "the bad girl of Bulgarian cinema".
Despite the many interruptions, her work always reflected what was going on in the world at the time: the personality cult and the Hungarian uprising of 1956, the war in Vietnam and the waves of protests that swept many countries in the 1960s, the feminist movement in the 1970s and the 1980, and the stagnation of the last years of socialism.