‘Last of Bulgarians’ all optimists – First Bulgarian film shortlisted for Oscars

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PARIS, Oct 8, (Agencies): Stephan Komandarev’s latest film started as a joke.

“I was in a taxi talking to the driver when he asked me, ‘Do you know why Bulgaria is the Land of Optimists?’” said Komandarev, who still laughs at the idea.

“It’s the Land of Optimists because all the pessimists and the realists have already left”, the driver told him.

That bitter joke set the film-maker, the first Bulgarian ever to be shortlisted for the Oscars, thinking.

The Balkan country has lost a fifth or more of its population since the fall of Communism despite becoming a member the EU a decade ago.

“There were nine million of us when the wall came down, and we are now around five million. And there hasn’t been a war”, the director told AFP.

Official figures put Bulgaria’s population closer to seven million — statistics Komandarev says are contested, claiming they do not take into account millions of Bulgarians who spend most of the year working abroad.

Whatever the figure, experts agree Bulgaria’s population is likely to become the fastest-shrinking in the world.

So Komandarev set out to make a kind of “Canterbury Tales” of the disappearing Bulgarians told through the taxi drivers of the capital Sofia and their passengers.

Over the course of a day and a night, “Directions” — or “Taxi Sofia” as it is called in some countries — follows teachers, businessmen and even a priest driving taxis to make ends meet.

“There are three priests driving taxis right now in Sofia”, said Komandarev.

“Anyone who has lost their job or who is paid very little, like school teachers and academics, drive taxis at night. These people see real life on the streets, not just the life we see on television”.

The taxi driver who told Komandarev the joke was a professor of nuclear physics at the country’s Academy of Sciences until he lost his job during the “interminable transition” to the market economy, which has already lasted 27 years in Bulgaria.

“We have been waiting for what seems like several lifetimes for the invisible hand of the market to sort everything out”, said the director, who had an international hit with his upbeat “The World is Big and Salvation Lurks Around the Corner”.

“In the meantime, we have lost our social system and education system. I am not nostalgic for Communism — I was so happy when it ended — but we destroyed things that we should have kept”, Komandarev argued.

He said the EU’s poorest state had “gone from for totalitarianism to extreme capitalism.

“The impression you get from the media is that everything is going great. ‘We are in the EU!’ But the reality is people are getting poorer, the level of education is falling and old people are living in a terrible way”, he said.

Insists

Komandarev insists his film’s portrait of the travails of “transition” holds true not just for Bulgaria but for several Eastern Europe countries.

The film bible Variety hailed it as a “clever, fleet-footed” snapshot of Bulgarians left behind, and praised its “poignant accuracy and flashes of wry humour”, comparing its favourably with Jim Jarmusch’s “Night on Earth”.

It is not the first time the director has taken on his country’s woes. He tackled the rural exodus in his 2010 documentary “The Town of the Badante Women” about a community whose women had all left for Italy to look after old people there.

His last feature, “Judgment” took on the prickly subject of the migrant crisis from the point of view of a former border guard who ends up smuggling Syrian refugees over the frontier from Turkey on which Bulgaria has now built a fence.

With such engagement, Komandarev, 51, admits that he has come under pressure to enter politics himself.

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LOS ANGELES: In a festival that eschews a true set of awards, the curation of the tributes and spotlight events it holds is probably the best lens by which to understand just where its heart lies. When it comes to the Mill Valley Film Festival, which is holding its 40th gathering this year just north of San Francisco, the careful curation of its lineup of honorees and spotlight names is exactly that: a focus on unique aspects of American life, culture and society — with a particular diverse angle.

“We really try to gauge what’s happening in any given year, and hand out tributes as lifetime honors and spotlights that focus on a particular point in a person’s career”, says MVFF director of programming Zoe Elton.

“It’s obviously important for any festival to present their audience with the most interesting voices out there present a range of different points of view”, says Dee Rees, Director of “Mudbound”, who will be one of the filmmakers receiving a spotlight honor this year.

She’s in good company: along with Rees, Spotlight honors, which consist of screenings and in-person conversations along with the award presentation, this year are going to Greta Gerwig, director-writer of “Lady Bird” and “Breathe” star Andrew Garfield. Tributes, meanwhile, are being handed out to “The Big Sick’s” Holly Hunter; Kristin Scott Thomas, star of opening-night film “Darkest Hour”; longtime festival attendee and supporter Sean Penn; and director Todd Haynes, whose “Wonderstruck” will make its California premiere at the festival.

“I’ve only ever been to the Mill Valley Film Festival once before, but it was an event I will never forget”, Haynes says.

It was in 2007, the year the festival presented Haynes’ Bob Dylan film “I’m Not There”, which was followed by a Dylan-tribute concert with a number of musicians, including Ramblin’ Jack Elliott, Bob Weir and Chris Isaak.

“It was such a trip for me to meet Ramblin’ Jack Elliott and to share the film with this super-engaged, but down-to-earth audience at Mill Valley”, Haynes says.

There is a certain unity that threads through the honorees and their films this year; at least, in a way they all strike different chords in terms of storytelling and approach. Haynes’ “Wonderstruck” jumps between time periods to focus on two young people seeking long-lost family members and idols. “The Big Sick” examines cultural differences and the way they can cause problems in romantic relationships, while Gerwig’s autobiographical “Lady Bird” is about young womanhood in turn-of-the-century Sacramento.

Scott Thomas and Garfield are outliers of a sort in that their films are focused on British history and history-makers. But both subjects of their films — Winston Churchill and a man paralyzed by polio — emphasize a blend of stiff-upper-lip-ness with true Yankee adaptability, and that also makes it feel like a natural fit.

Meanwhile, Rees’ “Mudbound” is a historical look at Jim Crow laws in Mississippi, and, as she notes, it’s also about much more than that: “‘Mudbound’ is about not being able to come home”, she says. “About how family can drown you; about how we are all mired together in the muck of our own dysfunctional system”.

Having diversity that covers not just budget, but subject matter and the demographics of the filmmaker is what makes MVFF so appealing to those in the business as well as audiences”.We felt we had to come out and say, ‘This is what we do’”, says Elton. “We felt the more public we became with the issues we were addressing, the more we could provoke conversations”.

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