School for Hope, the documentary debut of Yana Alexieva, presents itself as a “film with a cause”, whose main goal is to promote the work of the Rusalya Association. Founded more than ten...
What’s best about a movie triumphing at a festival is it gives its crew some room to breathe. Every award is a token for a little bit more freedom, giving space for experiments and for expanding...
The film was released in 2022, when Petya Dubarova, a Bulgarian poet born in Burgas, could have been 60 had she not taken her own life at only 17.
The screenwriters Nelly Dimitrova and Valentina...
The presence of mobsters in our culture turned totalitarian kitsch into a total one. Kitsch reeks from every pore of our social, political, and mundane life. It makes art profane, degrades the individ...
“If you make a bad movie about someone who died, then you’ve done something abominable and dull,” warns Nikola Boshnakov, the director of “My Uncle Luben.” Thankfull...
Contemporary Bulgarian cinema often features protagonists who end up breaking the law not because they are necessarily “evil”, but because the corrupt milieus they inhabit leave them littl...
“Vaklush” delves into the character of Vaklush Tolev—a spiritual teacher and thinker, one of the few who try to offer a holistic worldview grounded in our fundamental concerns and jo...
Bulgarian cinema isn’t a huge fan of remakes, and yet, here is one, a contemporary adaptation of “Shibil,” originally a story by Bulgarian author Yordan Yovkov. The movie’s dir...
As a director and a screenwriter, Antonia Milcheva is hard-set on her affinity for short films. Her work has received a prize at Sarajevo IFF, the Jameson Award at Sofia Film Festival, and now, a...
To return to your childhood home, only to find it empty — ready to be sold off, demolished, and forgotten: “Oh, hidden cries of a mournful stranger, idly recalling mother and homeland.&rdq...
Recently, a John Malkovich-directed play caused an uproar amidst some social fractions in Bulgaria. Discontent over Bernard Shaw’s play, Arms and the Man, which supposedly ridicules Bulgarian so...
Twice Upon a Time in the West was one of the most anticipated Bulgarian films of the year, attracting audience interest mainly because it features Italian silver screen legend Claudia Cardinale....
If memories make us what we are, then our essence is just as fragile and unreliable as our memory. “Before I Forget” poses the question of what happens to us when memories start to fade, a...
Pernik, whose weathered folklore has been eclipsed by jokes about tough guys skirting the law, stands at the centre of this movie. Its characters are gifted with all kinds of flaws, but the one thing...
Ecce homo is an exceptionally well-crafted film directed by the up-and-coming filmmaker Dimitar Kutmanov. Within its brief runtime, the work deftly succeeds in outlining and masterfully conveying...
Kamen Kalev's fourth feature film, inspired by his grandfather's life trajectory, is an attempt to portray a life lived, according to the director himself, "not with the mind, but with the heart"; a l...
November 1988: Berlin's Theater der Westens lends its stage to the first-ever European Film Awards. With the statuette for Best Film in hand, Krzysztof Kieślowski modestly addresses the anxiety in the...
The theme of success is a useful prism to observe the shortcomings and achievements of Bulgarian cinema in recent years. Most of all, their content can be analysed through it and this can turn out to...
Recently, two feature films have appeared on the Bulgarian cinema scene - Aga (2018) by Milko Lazarov and Letters from Antarctica (2019) by Stanislav Donchev. The former became one of the most frequen...
