2013

London 1978: Bulgarian writer and dissident, Georgi Markov is poisoned to death. The assassination plot reads like a James Bond film: an umbrella is supposed to be the murder weapon. For years the British and Russian secret services blame each other. Still one of the biggest murder cases in history remains unexplained. 35 years later the director sets out to solve the mystery. Through his lengthy enquiries he succeeds in getting the prime suspect, the Bulgarian agent Francesco “Piccadilly” Guillino to appear in front of the camera. A gripping documentary crime thriller that deals with the history of the Cold War and reveals the current intrigues within our secret services.

A charmer as handsome as Apollo, women’s favourite, undisciplined, a bruiser, a fascist: Who was he actually? Who was Dimirtar Spisarevski? The film is a panopticon of a kind of different segments of our society today, which in a funny and absurd and at times, in a dramatic and a fanatical way asserts their right to have their own opinion and interpretation of the character and the right to identification with him.

A man, Nikola Vaptsarov was sentenced to death on 23 July 1942 by a field court marshal of the then Bulgarian puppet government. Surprisingly enough, the then Communist leaders in charge of Vaptsarov’s activities and tried by the same court, got off with lighter sentences and in the wake of the upheaval of 1944 stood at the helm of this country. A decade later, the world got to know that the man executed in the hot summer of 1942 was the greatest of all the Bulgarian poets born in the twentieth century. And his nearest and dearest took to cashing in on his popularity.