Bulgaria

A young actor with his backbone broken (he is crippled after a bad fall on the stage) is being treated in a hospital. He is invalidated for good and he wills not to live further on. He gets acquainted with a 10-year-old boy, Leonid, from the adjoining room. The boy is spending time in hospital with an arm in a plastic cast. They make friends. In fact, the actor intends to use the kid to provide him with poison. He starts telling a marvelous fairy tale. “Yo-ho-ho” – this old refrain of a pirate song is all too familiar. For the sake of the boy the Actor invents stories about the good buccaneer who is fighting the evil ruler Alvarez who must be punished for his crimes. Little by little the real people in hospital are transformed into the imaginary heroes of the pirate stories that the Actor and the child vanquished by goodness, honesty and self-denial. The boy is fascinated. Gradually, this pre-planned friendship develops into sincere devotion and affection. Leonid’s attachment to his older friend, and his trustfulness and good heart make the Actor abandon his plan of suicide and restore his faith in life. He realizes that life is worth living it, even if paralyzed.Read More »

Margarit and Margarita is a poignant story of teenage love and rebellion, Nikolai Volev’s film pictures the corruption and moral decay in the late years of communist Bulgaria. Teenagers Margarit and Margarita are in love; consequently, Margarit cannot prevent himself from rising to Margarita’s defense at school when another boy plays a joke on her. Margarit is thrown out of school, and Margarita joins him. At first things are looking up for the new couple, because Margarita has an opportunity to study folk dance with Julian, an ostensibly gay dance instructor and may perhaps be able to join his company. Not only is Margarit jealous, but Julian is too, though of whom it is not entirely clear. Whatever his motives, Julian frames Margarita, and she persuades Margarit to take the rap for her, which he does. Then the lovely girl attracts the attentions of yet another shady character, the lustful and bisexual party boss Nerizanov. Things go downhill from there.Read More »

When the Iron Curtain fell in 1989, Bojina was eight years old. A short time after, her father, an artist, moved with her from Bulgaria to live in Paris. Twenty years later, this young woman returns to Sofia. She senses that there is something unspoken in her family’s past.Read More »

Quote:
Friends of different generations, practicing different professions, spend together their summer holidays at the seaside every year. It is sunny; they look carefree and happy. They know each other very well, they are used to each other. To such an extent, that bore becomes inevitable. It is boredom that incites them to play a dangerous game. The end is dramatic: a young boy gets killed. It is the moment to draw the bottom line. The question is: Isn’t the death of the spirit worse than of the body?Read More »

The story begins with a serious disillusionment experienced by a young girl at her school-leaving farewell ball.
Apostol, an architect on this side of forty, meets by chance Bella at a swimming pool on the night of her graduation party.

Winner: Silver Prize – Moscow International Film Festival’1977Read More »

The film takes us back to the days of Bulgarian Resistance during Second World War. Beautiful love between two young people burns out against the background of the Nazi reality.Read More »

This is a film about a group of ten-year-old who are defending their independence at school, in the street and at home. Their methods of resisting brutality and overcoming the lack of understanding are so ingenuous that eventually they succeed in making a laughing stock of their parents, teachers and neighbors. And indeed, compulsion is completely futile if Mitko is to be prevented from moving the ears in class. The unfair punishment only helps spread his fame throughout the school, so that he gets an army of followers and imitators. The war with Uncle Tanas, the cheating grocer of neighborhood store, also ends victoriously. After many ups and downs, and mainly thanks to the solidarity of the children, they manage to get back their football, which has fallen into a passing lorry and disappeared.Read More »

Cat in the Wall tells the true story of how a cat, stuck in a wall, changes the lives of aspirational migrants, benefit fraudsters and gentrified Brexiteers.

As documentarians, Mina Mileva and Vesela Kazakova have always been fearless. The duo’s rage permeates their first foray into fiction, Cat in the Wall. An examination of society’s absurdities and unfairness through the eyes of Irina, a single Bulgarian mother whose place in London is challenged in every way, turning her into a metaphoric “cat in the wall”, just like the real one.Read More »

IMDb wrote:
A Bulgarian youth and a foreign girl meet at a Bulgarian seaside resort. They like each other and joking begin first a word game, and then another game called ‘The Pope Is Ill’. It turns out, however, that it is not the Pope who is really ill, but the girl’s father, an eminent western nuclear physicist who is terminally ill with cancer. His daughter is scared to death of the possible nuclear Armageddon, which has repeatedly been discussed in her presence. Gradually the carefree beach side mood is replaced by a serious conversation rich in implied meanings. A series of ‘visions’ reveals the view of each of two young people, which turn out to be very different. The girl imagines the apocalyptic end of the world, while the boy thinks of the evolution of life from its origins to the colonization of other space.Read More »