With Not everything that flies is a bird, in 1970 Sajtinac signed off on his first own production. The film describes the suffering of a character who is renovating his house while being confronted with a monstrous bird which is terrorising and oppressing him. It should be read as a parable of the 1968 Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia. The film was subject to severe criticism at the 1970 Oberhausen film festival in Germany in 1970, in particular from directors from South American communist countries.