Documentary films

  • In Cuba everything is expressed in music: declaration of love or rich harvest, birth of a child or loss of a donkey, longing or melancholy. Though the Cuban music is wellknown all over the world, few know what "son“ and "bolero“ mean, when these styles emerged and where they originated from. Thanks to the great Bulgarian singer Jordanka Hristova we are opening the secret room of Cuban music and the forgotten files, where the history of "son“ and "bolero“ is kept.
  • Bulgaria is the last country in Europe where not long ago dancing bears could be spotted in the streets, led on chains by bear-ward gypsies. Under pressure exerted by environmental organizations this practice was banned. With the generous financial help of western foundations the biggest and most sophisticated Dancing Bear Park was built near the small mountain town of Belitsa, and the surviving animals were resettled there. The film tells the story of the bears and the people - the former bear-wards who are left without their livelihood, and the local impoverished population who say with envy: “In Belitsa you should be a bear!”
  • 20 years after Marin Marchevski has made another film about his former heroes Gosho, Tsetso, Boncho and Nedelcho. The four men speak about the hindrances and challenging experience they have lived through in the past years. Their stories – funny, sad, comprehensive, sometimes even absurd – reflect life in Bulgaria after the upheaval. The film is also about the undying courage of the four racers – four passionate dreamers, who remained true to themselves and never let hardships break them.
  • “Political apathy is a choice, apathy against nature is suicide” reads the placard of the youth who have occupied The Eagles’ Bridge in sofia as part of the protest against the ruling of the supreme Administrative Court to delete strandzha National Park from the register of the protected territories. Mountains, rivers, dunes, cliffs, coastal areas, plant and animal species, habitats and unique natural landmarks can disappear from the face of the Earth by a single word “deletion”.
  • A tough journey of a woman from the comfort of her German home back to her roots; to the hard existence in her fatherland, which is both striving for survival and a sense of life … A long journey of a small East-European post-socialist country to the high living standards of the West… A film about the “road to Europe” that goes through Bulgarian village – to a destination unknown…
  • Dimitar Shishmanov, son of Bulgarian writer and researcher Prof. Ivan Shishmanov, was a lawyer and diplomat, writer and politician, whose name was coercively wiped off in 1945. The documentary lifts the curtain on the unjust obliteration, bringing this very interesting figure as closer as possible through his confession and personal revelations.
  • The film consists of three cameos about three types of life, three ways of dealing with existence. The first of them is a pastoral scene of a shepherd who tends his flock atop the Kalin mount. The second cameo is a dramatic account of the watchman in the power station near Kalin. The third is a tragic tale about the psychiatric hospital in the village of Pastra.
  • This is a film about the difficult and unpredictable life of Peter Dinev, a composer of liturgical music. He was a witness of the collapse of three empires, twice witnessed the mass desecration of churches but he managed to preserve the spirit of the Bulgarian Renaissance to the present day. is an attempt to unify the Byzantine tradition, modern European thought and the experience of a man who lived in a state which does not like its own citizens.
  • 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.
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