Discoveries from Bulgaria World Cinema

A crowd of people gathered in a room, apparently petrified by something invisible - Will it ever set them free?

This is a film about the fate of a group of students and their wondering to find their true place in life. Of course each of them tries to find his own way.

"No One Can Be" is a documentary about the TDK group, about the song "Furniture", about our friends who, for one reason or another, are not around us, but we keep in our minds. The awkward state where you just can't keep your balance when faced with the thought of life in the next 50 years. What will you be when you grow up?

The story of a traveling Bulgarian circus before the collapse of “developed socialism” in the People’s Republic of Bulgaria. A portrait “without masks and without makeup” of a troupe and of an era - behind the scenes and under the spotlight.

Late 1970's in a small Balkan village. The village population is made up of the elderly folks whose children have moved to the big city. The monotony is broken with the arrival of a documentary crew.

A film about the contrasts between Czechoslovakia and Bulgaria in 1968. A film that reveals the mechanisms of censorship and propaganda during communism. A film about how information about events in Czechoslovakia was distorted in Bulgaria.

The film traces the life of a young woman who works in a hotel as a chambermaid. How ever this is not sufficient for the owner of the hotel who forces her to do odd jobs and even to be a call-girl.

The film follows a character facing a silent inner battle, struggling with the fear of speaking up and finding their voice.

A girl that have a passion to paint

The fun adventures of Choko the stork and Boko the frog are full of rivalry. They cheat on each other all the time, but there's a strong bond between them. Maybe one day they will be friends.

Four classmates, escaping the hustle and bustle of their prom, are together one last time in Nick's car. Faced with the challenge of sharing all their secret thoughts, longings and fears, they embark on an exciting journey with many dangerous turns and amorous passions in the pouring rain.

1930s, Dobrudja. The shepherds Vasil, Peter and Ago work in the farm of Zachariah and Sevastitsa. Vasil is the manager of the sheepfold. In his house lives the young and beautiful Vasilena, for whom everyone sighs.

The Soviet occupation of Bulgaria (1944-1947) causing the greatest political, financial and moral turning point in the new Bulgarian history.

A man recalls his childhood in the late 1930s. Uncle Godfather was a favourite of the children - a trickster and combiner, full of kindness, warmth of heart and affection for them. All the time he lives in the world of illusions, builds fantastic plans for getting rich quick, tells fictional heroic stories, but in the game room, behind the roulette, he says goodbye to his hopes. In plot and atmosphere, the film is a kind of sequel to the musical My Father the Painter, created by the same authors in 1974.

The story of a 13-year-old Rumen, nicknamed: "The Pig". He is being molested everyday by his schoolmates. Alone and closed in himself outsider, he has used to the insults and to not return back. While one day, he instinctively strikes a single, maybe fatal, blow.

Short Bulgarian documentary shown at Cannes 1961.

There has always been and there will always be men, whose ideas have propelled the world forward. This is a film about those few, who have sacrificed themselves to implement their ideas.

The short film tells the story of a disgruntled employee who, in the name of corporate teambuilding, is forced to exercise positive thinking while planting trees. But it's only after she has passed through cruelty and succeeded in connecting with another human being that she is able to experience a moment of peace and love.

A coming-of-age, experimental, short film in which we follow Philip’s journey in overcoming family issues, fear, and mental health struggles to succeed in his dream of becoming a successful dancer. The film’s essence is about finding your inner glow, when you are down in the dark, surrounded by your own metaphoric demons and the importance of reflection. Glow also tries to challenge societal stigma on male dancers. It relies mainly on body language, mimics, dance, and music to express emotions, rather than dialogue.

A compilation of experimental film by a teenager

Two boys in the conspiracy - imaginary or real? ... The adventures of two boys who themselves create "a conspiracy". At the beginning of summer vacation boy moved to a new neighborhood, where start start unusual ...

Fifteen years after the dot-com crash and the suicide of his father, Victor works as a professor in finance. When his girlfriend leaves him for a wealthy Wall Street guy, Victor decides to enter the world of capital markets where he faces the person responsible for the death of his father.

Studio (in French: garçonnière - a place for a bachelor without partition walls). And in the horror of tomorrow's apocalypse and in the exhaustion of yesterday's love even in the fleeting moment of bliss beware of the like The man is a crowd.

We follow the story of a Bulgarian elderly couple living in a stagnant small village called Balabansko. Taking care of the family house passed down the generations has been their life’s work. What does their future hold and why can’t they let go of the past?

Boyan's thoughts among the grasslands.

Elbetitsa is an ancient symbol that has been a central element of Bulgarian culture and history for thousands of years.

In 1987, a group of students broke the Pantheon of dead anti-fascists in the sea garden of Burgas. Due to the public position and the authority of the parents, the incident was hidden, and the photos of the documentary investigation were suspended.

three men lost at sea

Bozhidar is a young, artistic photographer who produces T-shirts with suburban photo collages. One day he comes upon Victor the bully. Despite the differences between them, the two guys find a common ground. Having a good time with Victor means more than just friendship for Bozhidar, and he finds an interesting way to express his feelings.

Anyone else in his place would have given up, but not him. Just a month after narrowly surviving being hit by a car, high-altitude mountaineer and research-zoologist Boyan Petrov starts his recovery and long preparation to continue his dream: climbing all the fourteen 8,000-meter peaks. Without supplementary oxygen and 3 times cancer survivor, he has climbed all 10 of the 14 eight-thousanders. Now it's time for the world's giant - Everest. For this purpose, Boyan starts his journey by "warming-up" with the lowest peak among them - the so-called "dwarf" Shishapangma. Number 11 on his bucket list. An unexpected twist of fate leads to his disappearance a few meters under the peak which activates an unprecedented interstate rescue mission and helicopter searches between the countries of Nepal, China, and Bulgaria.

Yana, Trayan's girlfriend, is raped by three men. To enact revenge Trayan infiltrates their gang with intent to kill.

A story set during the peasant uprising of 1923 in Bulgaria.

The character is an artist-turned-suicide-bomber, unaware of the pointlessness of his acts taken to just gain one more day of his futile life. He has the potential to grasp the meaning, but is unable to fathom it for there is no meaning at all.

Partsalev: A documentary

A commercial film for the Bulgarian beer, Shumensko pivo, showing manual and automatic washing of bottles, pouring beer, a bus decorated with the logo of Shumensko pivo, circling the streets of Pazardzhik, along with various scenes of people drinking beer, accompanied by advertising verses.

Partisans hijack a boat

A group of people gathers in a village inn to wait for a storm to pass.

A frog daydreams of flying like a bird and starts trying different ways to achieve his goal.

In the course of three years we traced several young people with a strongly developed patriotic feeling, who define themselves as nationalists. They cross the thin line between patriotism and a pronounced nationalism.

Twelve-year-old Ro's search for a pirated VHS copy of David Lynch's Eraserhead takes her to a place she never dreamed of.

This interesting melodrama with a dash of political realism looks at the difficult adjustment to life in the city after a life in the countryside. Anna (Marianna Dimitrova) and her husband Ivan (Plamen Sirakov) move to the capital of Sofia in search of advancement. He works the day shift in a factory, and she works at night in a textile mill. That arrangement allows one of them to always be home with the children. Much to Anna's chagrin, a fellow worker develops a passion for her and almost drives a wedge between herself and her husband. Meanwhile, the owner of the villa they now share needs to use it again, so the two have to find an apartment. Worse yet, Anna's mother dies unexpectedly. But at least her death takes them back home and gives them a chance to re-examine their values before city life shreds them completely.

A shepherd herds sheep and chases a wolf. The teacher leads his students and chases the naughty one. The priest leads the novices and chases after the indecisive one . The officer leads the soldiers and punishes the deserter. Four groups coming from different directions are mixed in one herd. The officer commands, and everyone marches, even the wolf.

Upcoming short film.

One of the last nomadic Pomaks in Bulgaria search for the finest grazing fields for their cows and sell their milk to support themselves, dedicated to preserving their freedom and independence.

A paper man builds a paper house in a paper world.

A boy and a girl, motherless children, wander through rural landscapes in a quest for survival.

Before our very eyes a strange human-bird hybrid undergoes constant transformation to cope with the omnipresent tensions of economical, ideological, military, and climatic threats.

Hilarious and dramatic teen story about real girls and boys, magical mermaids and their problems. Can a summer love last forever? Who wants to sabotage the mermaids and how do they deal with their relationship? That's a question for at least one movie time!

Saturday. Everything starts as usual with speeding motor bikes effortlessly towards: "wherever we go" The deep forest they find themselves in is their smallest problem..

A young man is trying to hold his life and career together. He writes. When he learns that his wife is pregnant, everything collapses. He enters the dark space of his fears, where he is confronted by memories of his childhood. He needs to face the absence of his own father and embrace the pain. Only then he is ready to accept his newly born child and become a parent.

Animation based on a children’s song.

When in 1961 Albania broke off its relations with the Soviet Union, Albanian men married to foreign women were forced to split up with their wives and drive them away. The official reason: fear of espionage. Thus a coercive mass expulsion of women and children started in Albania. Those, who did not obey, spent years in prisons. Families were torn apart for more than 30 years. Today these families are trying to reunite. Will they succeed? The film tells the stories of three of these couples, and of those apparatchiks and officers of the secret services who brought about their destruction.

This is a story about an Easter-time vacation. The film-makers returns to the 1960s because that is the time of their childhood. With a fine sense of irony they dwell on the relations between an adolescent boy called Slaveiko and a little girl Bogdanka who has come down from Sofia, his mother and father, Aunt Nelly and the Doctor, and make us consider the responsibility of adults to children.

“In Sofia, the residents of a mythical building had been evicted. I had come to hunt for film locations.” After this brief introductory title card, we discover what makes this Bulgarian building mythical, why its residents were evicted and how location-hun­ting turned into a film.

A hundred-year-old church that emerged and sank from the bottom of a large dam is where Father Zlatan is trying to organize a reunion with the survivors and scattered heirs of the sunken village. An arrogant surgeon-politician, a pastor-operatic singer, a famous international journalist and an Italian student go through major life vicissitudes from Rome, to Vienna, to Kandahar, only to discover that…

In the weeks and months surrounding the overthrowing of Bulgaria's socialist dictatorship, the public's taste for democratic discussion begs to be sated. Kiryakov's camera walks through Sofia's South Park as it turns into a hotbed for ideological debate and picketing, where citizens from all walks of life share their hopes despite the winter weather.

Bulgaria, a nation rich in cultural heritage and historical significance, has been shaped by the influences of various ancient civilizations and is now a modern European state experiencing significant growth and development.

An artist's hand tries to draw a drummer with various tools and techniques, but he cannot do it for some reason. Finally he pinches his index finger and draws the drummer with his red blood. The drummer starts hitting the drum and the artist tries to erase it with no success. At the end the artist's hand remains white and motionless while the blood-drawn drummer keeps drumming.

Night. A man drowns in a rough sea. A lighthouse guard risks his life to save a drowned man. He gives him food, gives him his bed. When the lighthouse guard falls asleep, the rescued man steals his boat. As the next lighthouse approaches, he submerges the boat and starts shouting for help.