Vesela Kazakova
Cat in the Wall tells the true story of how a cat, stuck in a wall, changes the lives of aspirational migrants, benefit fraudsters and gentrified Brexiteers.
While the left idea conceived by Karl Marx gains popularity around the world, a country from the former Socialist block is torn apart by Communist apparatchiks and informers. 25 years after the fall of Communism a young Bulgarian opens her Grandad's Secret Service file to unravel the past and find answers to why the Socialist idea had failed so badly in reality. When reading the file entitled "Beast" she realizes that the Red Beast has never left Bulgaria. In a semi-mystic dialogue with her Granddad, visualized with animated sequences she restores the collective memory of generations so far apart.
This documentary was subjected to condemnation and attempts for institutional censorship as soon as it was done. The film observes how one man makes a career using another in the totalitarian society of Communist Bulgaria.
Revenge is a recurrent theme in thrillers, usually dispensed by action heroes with a well-stocked arsenal. But in Yorgos Tsemberopoulos’s nuanced moral maze the protagonist is the bookish Kostas (Manolis Mavromatakis), a suburban florist well versed in social and political theory, which he discusses at length with a local publican. But when his home is invaded by masked hoodlums, who bind his family and rape his teenage daughter, our everyman hero finds his intellectual stance untenable. Encouraged by his paranoid, militarist neighbour, Kostas decides to take the law into his own hands, and in doing so begins to understand – for the first time – the world he has been living in. The vigilante movie is a well-explored genre too, but Tsemberopoulos gives it a whole new urgency, subverting the cliched right-wing fantasy structure and seeing it through the eyes of a man who comes to find his real self while trying to live up to the (imagined) expectations of others. (Source: LFF programme)
When his clan, including his wife and baby girl Néa, are massacred, Ao, a desperate Neandertal man, decides to leave the North country where he has been living for the South where he was born. His aim is to join his twin brother, from whom he was separated when he was nine. On his long and adventurous way home, he meets Aki, a Homo Sapiens woman...
Somewhere in a war zone. Three young stationed soldiers try to distract themselves from everyday wartime existence. One of them takes notice of a local girl. The comrades follow her.
This is a story of strange, impossible, inexplicable love between a Muslim Turk woman and a non-Muslim Bulgarian man. Ivan (the Bulgarian) is a pure and romantic young fellow, who gets caught up in the so-called "regeneration process" (when ethnic Turks' names were forcibly changed to Bulgarian ones). He is responsible for the official seals, which is required to issue the new identity documents after the forced name changes. The schoolteacher Ayten tries to steal the seals, thinking that this way she can slow down the ethnic genocide. Their unexpected and unusual meeting brings these two characters together and makes them fell close, forcing Ivan to take a fateful decision -he must either "rename" Ayten, or face the consequences if he does not.
Fleeing an abusive relationship, Mila, a teen prostitute, finds herself in a border town, pregnant, alone, and, to her surprise, welcome. The remote village is on a marijuana plantation run by a group of elderly men and women. Not having known much kindness, she goes into emotional hiding, but by the time the baby is born she has a new life and love. Her past, however, is not far behind
A mother stork is shot down from a chimney. A postnatal woman nearly jumps off a balcony. A girl contracts HIV from an adulterous partner. A woman applies make-up to two kittens. A mother looks for magic in the lunar calendar. These events are commonplace for this seemingly normal family, revealing the fine line they live between fragility and absurdity. In the meantime, their country Bulgaria is shaken up by anti-gender and anti-equality protests with an undercurrent of violence. These women are united by a shared trauma, but now they are ready to confront their father’s troubling past.
Vesa, a 16-year old Bulgarian girl, cannot speak. A fortune-teller predicts that the girl will convalesce if somebody sacrifices their life for her. The fortune-teller's mentally challenged nephew, who comes to hear the prophecy, follows the girl.
