Feature films

26 young boys and girls, set on a professional carrier in theatre, face an invisible selection committee. What answers could rescue them from the awful manipulations so that not to miss the great chance of their life, their only life? This is the story of the film "Which Way Now?" made 20 years ago. And here they are today, at a cocktail party to celebrate this emblematic anniversary in their life. Tonight memories, personal clashes and striking sincerity alternate with bursts of euphoria and nostalgia. The characters compare their former hopes to their present aspirations, the folly and enthusiasm of youth to the everyday life in the present. How much have they succumbed to routine, depression and the unavoidable wrinkles cut in their faces in the course of these 20 years? Which way today?

The young and ambitious prosecutor Christian is surprised to be assigned a sensitive case involving an older colleague who has been accused of corruption. A case that could have been a springboard for his career turns out to have the opposite effect. The accused asserts his innocence, but Christian’s superiors force him to bring the man to trial – even without evidence. The prosecutor’s efforts to bring truth to light leads him to discover a major plot. The case is taken away from him; he is suspended and effectively silenced. The system hits back with a vengeance and pulls the rug from beneath the young man’s feet.

This is a story about a fantastic world where magic and miracles are an integral part of reality. Skilled wizards promote the development of their secret science while ordinary people can only suspect its existence and the real place it occupies in their life. The events the film relates are unleashed by the unhealthy ambition of a genius who searches for conquering the world – a none too uncommon occurrence up to now in any world, known or unknown.

Evagoras is a family man who lives in Cyprus. He has five daughters and secretly longs for a son. So he gives Saint Andreas his word of honor that if he acquires a son he will walk all the way to the Saint’s monastery and be there on the patron Saint’s day. He finally acquires a son and must now keep his word to the Saint. Before he sets out on the long trek from one end of Cyprus to the other, his father, who is a priest, admonishes him: “My son, the road ahead is full of temptations. Take care, for you must be clean and pure when you reach the Saint!” Evagoras promises but, unfortunately, in the course of the journey, while trying to do good, he ends up committing every kind of sin…

The film is a romantic comedy, inspired by the fairytale word of Hoffmann’s phantasms. A small antiquarian bookshop has survived as if by miracle amidst the centre of an enormous modern city, squeezed between glass and concrete. The keeper and a few visitors (true friends) are very much like Hoffmann’s characters. The action alternately takes place both now and in the past, diving into the parallel worlds of the reality and the magic.

The sudden death of his father urges Zeus to contact his older halfbrother, Vasil, who left the family years ago. Vasil has no intentions to help his younger brother finance the funeral. When he finally agrees to help Zeus to sell his car, the two brothers set off on a fateful journey.

The story unfolds in one night. The main character, the Moth is freed on parole after spending time in prison on wrongful conviction for a murder. He was sent to jail shortly before the Bulgarian communist coup of 1944, and now finds himself in a new and alien world – the totalitarian Sofia of the 1960s. All hell breaks loose as soon as he walks out of jail.