Bella, a sensitive and clever girl, experiences her first disillusionment at the school graduation ball. The following morning, she meets Apostol, a middle-aged man, architect, and former participant in the anti-fascist struggle. He reveals to her his views on life. He introduces her to Bufo, a younger person, and a failure as an actor although possessing “the talent of a friend”. Thus the trio is formed. Bella marries Bufo, though Apostol remains the man and person whom she would have desired to meet in her lifetime.
Tag: BULGARIA
During World War II, by way of covert communication in besieged Sofia, Veska joins a group of teenage anti-fascists. Here she meets Dimo, a handsome, passionate member of the small but ferocious resistance. As the group strives to thwart Nazi advancements in Sofia, romance blossoms between Veska and Dimo. With an ambitious stylistic eye, Zhelyazkova masterfully directs a story of forbidden love and the relentlessness of teenage conviction.
The fundamental questions of human life about guilt, repentance, and redemption are addressed in the two-fold documentary essay delving into the grief of the women from Sliven Prison who give birth to their children behind bars. Binka Zhelyaskova anatomizes a deep collective trauma through the unique stories of her heroines. The film wasn’t screened in the theaters until 1989, following a series of changes in the country’s social milieu.
Ivan’s best friend, Kamen, is in an American hospital, in coma after an accident. Since he’s denied a visa to the USA and can’t stay by his side in his last moments, Ivan decides to set off for Bulgaria countryside, taking the camera Kamen has given him. There’s a legend in Kamen’s place of birth – a small mountain village – that one song could bring people back to life. Ivan starts a journey to find it and record it, collecting a myriad of stories along the way. Will he succeed?
A film about the last days of six women – six political prisoners. Each of them expects the coming execution in her own way. A film about human deeds under extreme circumstances.
As a boy, Dominik watched an American crime boss murder his father, a police officer fighting corruption in Sofia, Bulgaria. Years later, he attempts to avenge his father’s death but is imprisoned for 15 years for attempted murder. In prison, he meets an American photo-journalist who shares his enemy and his thoughts of revenge. Released from prison, the two hatch a plot which involves the man’s recently-arrived daughter.
——UPGRADED——
In the age of the Bulgarian National Revival an icon painter is invited to do frescoes and to decorate the icon stand in a newly built orthodox church in a small Bulgarian town. He inspires love feelings in a young girl – Katerina, who opposes the common moral understandings in Bulgarian society.
It’s 1980. Malin is fatherless, angry, and in trouble. At 20, he’s spent a year in jail for assaulting a lover of Lily, his mother. In her desk he finds a soldier’s photograph and assumes he’s found his father. He confronts the man, now a teacher, and gets nowhere. At home again, he mocks his mother. Finally, she tells him her grim story, from the year before his birth. We see a people’s court, where Lily’s parents seek justice for their grandchild to be. We follow Lily to a prison camp, to the city where she’s told to inform on the only person who’s been kind, to an asylum, and finally to her current poverty and loneliness. How will Malin respond to these revelations?