After January and before his March visit to Sofia with A Horse Walks into a Bar, Samuel Finzi tells us why thinking and acting are more important than feeling when you’re on stage
For the team behind the project, the preservation of found family movies and amateur footage is a way to access authentic stories – and authentic history
"For me, everything takes a great deal of effort, but in the end it is exactly as it should be," says Martina Apostolova
He prefers to listen, to be invisible, to sit in the background and speak only when necessary – the ideal prerequisites for a director, cameraman and editor, which is what he is, along with being a member of the snowboard team Ninja Squad and the skate crew Stinky Socks.
"Spontaneous" is a word that often sneaks into Adela Peeva's stories when she is talking about her movies. Spontaneity seems to work for her – she recently turned seventy-five, and she marked the occasion with screenings of a selection of her films, from the more recent titles to ones that are rarely shown or were outright banned during totalitarianism.
Director and screenwriter Andrey Paounov is well known to connoisseurs of documentary cinema around the world with his trilogy about the "absurdities of the transition period."
If you've been to a screening from the MENAR Festival program (covering Middle Eastern, Central Asian and North African cinema), it's quite likely that the event also involved tea, food, or books.
In late February, hundreds of Russian animators joined their Ukrainian counterparts in condemning the war in a collective statement. Just a few days later, "Animators Against War" appeared in Russia – a collective of more than a hundred artists who created a series of short videos whose main message was "No to war."
They are the founders of the Bulgarian Photographic Association and the production company Agitprop, and in general have become perfectly communicating vases working in cinema, visual arts and photography. After many years of freelancing for leading Bulgarian and international publications and advertising agencies, Georgi Bogdanov and Boris Missirkov are turning to cinema and visual art.
After working in documentary film for more than 20 years, director and screenwriter Svetoslav Draganov made his feature debut in 2021 with the movie Humble, in which, however, the protagonist is the documentary genre itself.
Today, 20 years later, the Bulgarian documentary wave described at the beginning of this text is a thing of the past. But the interest in documentaries is still alive and well. Many of the people who were part of this wave have entered or are entering new territories.
Slava Doycheva has enough energy to power several people – she is one of our most promising young directors and screenwriters, a the tireless activists for the rights of women and LGBTI + people, and her work addresses these topics in a direct manner that's unusual for Bulgarian cinema.
Lora Musheva flies between the set and the studio, between the constantly changing roles of photographer, cinematographer, assistant camerawoman and director.
We can bet that we will be hearing the name of Leonor Telles more and more in the coming years.
Her two feature films Thirst (2015) and Sister (2019) won a number of awards at international festivals. She says that making movies can be tiring, thankless, annoying, ruinous, hysterical, draining, it can consign you to poverty and ruin all your illusions.
Romanian director Adina Pintilie's debut TOUCH ME NOT has become a byword for daring cinema - that which takes not only genres but also viewers out of the comfort zone
One of the strangest and most original things you can come across on YouTube – and as we know, there is some fierce competition there – is Green Porno by actress-model-activist Isabella Rossellini, a series about the biology and sexual habits of different creatures in the animal kingdom. A little more David Lynch than David Attenborough.
When the Iron Curtain fell in 1989, Bojina Panayotova was just eight years old. Shortly after, her family moved to Paris, where she discovered cinema. It brought her back to Bulgaria and her own past in her first feature film I See Red People, which had its world premiere as part of the Berlinale documentary program this year.