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?
Tag: BULGARIA
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?
During the 1800s, Peru’s government sends 2 envoys to negotiate peace with the rebellious Incas but a treasure-hunter bandit shoots the Inca ruler and his son, leaving the 2 envoys to take the blame for it.
A middle-aged Bulgarian is watching the change of the guard in front of the Buckingham Palace. For no apparent reason, while looking, in his mind he gets back to his childhood in the little Bulgarian village he grew up in. Different rites, different traditions and still he finds something in common. He recalls the people he knew, he feared or admired. He ponders over that life of no brilliance, where people plough, harvest, marry and die, celebrate or grieve. Miracle are also worked, conceived in a unlimited child’s imagination. It is the child’s perception of the world that helps us to give a meaning to the major questions of human existence.
——UPGRADED——
The Tied up Balloon was one of the most innovative and challenging works by Bulgaria’s pioneering female director, Binka Zhelyazkova. Set during WWII, a barrage balloon inexplicably appears in the sky above a remote peasant village creating an atmosphere of alarm, speculation and debate.