The new edition of the first Bulgarian documentary film festival dedicated to human rights - Sofia DocuМental starts in September.
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.
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.
Dad Made Dirty Movies introduces us to Stephen Apostolof, the most successful Bulgarian in Hollywood you've probably never heard of. Stephen was a former political prisoner, playboy, director of B-rated erotic films, father of five children and one of the founders of the first Bulgarian Orthodox Church in Los Angeles.