"For me, everything takes a great deal of effort, but in the end it is exactly as it should be," says Martina Apostolova
The new edition of the first Bulgarian documentary film festival dedicated to human rights - Sofia DocuМental starts in September.
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.
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.
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.
"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.
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.
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."
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.