Simon Versus Fear (The Varsano Case) won the Crystal Globe Award and Free Word Special Diploma at RusDocFilmFest, New York, 2019
Georgi Tenev’s Simon Versus Fear (The Varsano Case) (DOP Boris Missirkov and Georgi Bogdanov, edited by Elena Seymenova, music by Ivo Spassov, produced by Martichka Bozhilova, AGITPROP, with the support of Bulgarian National Film Center won The Crystal Globe Award and Free Word Special Diploma at RusDocFilmFest, New York, 2019. The film is the first ever Bulgarian film selected to take part in the prestigious festival.
RUSDOCFILMFEST-3W is an independent multi-ethnic Eastern-European documentary film festival in New York; it presents national cinema from Eastern European countries with all aspects of its aesthetic and problematic uniqueness to the American audience. Its mission is to support independent documentary cinema with strong social and cultural context and to create a close tie between international cinematographic communities. For the past 11 years, the festival has screened over 250 documentaries from different countries.
This year the festival program includes 17 documentary films made by filmmakers from Bulgaria, Lithuania, the U.S., Russia, and Ukraine, in partnership with film companies from Denmark, France, the U.K., Kazakhstan, Russia, and the U.S. Most of the films are American premieres.
The Crystal Globe Award and Free Word Special Diploma is given by New Review Inc., the publisher of The New Review, the oldest literary edition in Russian language founded in New York in 1942. The New Review was first in the world to publish excerpts from Boris Pasternak’s “Doctor Zhivago”, Varlam Shalamov’s “Kolyma Tales”, works of Bunin. The journal has also published Vladimir Nabokov, Adamovich, Alexandra Tolstoy, Schmemann and many other poets, writers, Russian intellectuals.
Former winners of the Free Word Award are filmmakers and journalists, among whom Alexandr Rastroguev, Alexey Pivovarov, Pavel Kostomarov, Askold Kurov, as well as four times Emmy winner Jim Brown.
