For Ana Bateva, one of the leading young theater directors in Bulgaria, being Macedonian in our country today is like being between a rock and a hard place
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."
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.
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