ДЗИФТ

Bulgaria

Synopsis

Moth is freed on parole after spending time in prison on wrongful conviction. All hell breaks loose as soon as he walks out of jail. His frantic chase after the truth draws the map of a diabolical totalitarian city. The story ends inside the gravediggers’ trailer where all secrets are revealed.

Director's Statement

Contemporary Bulgarian film deals mainly with everyday-life experiences or engages in constructing national identity drawing on the folklore tradition or revisiting traumatic moments of history. So, I thought that in such artistic context a radical genre attack could be refreshing and trigger a productive debate. I picked one of the sharpest genres of cinema and gave it a strong absurdist spin. The action is set in the midst of the ominously monumental spaces of the totalitarian state surrounded by a bleak zone of urban life packed with roguish riffraff and witty lowlife. We remember the days of “spotless” communism with our skin, its pompous ugliness and exuberant absurdities. So I decided to frame the banality of communist evil, to “estrange” it on screen, to render it utterly odd by using a set of genre devices -- the hardboiled cliché of neo-noir. This mix allowed me to walk the knife-edge between auteur and genre cinema.
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Cast & Crew

Directed by: Javor Gardev

Written by: Vladislav Todorov

Produced by: Georgi Dimitrov, Ilian Djevelekov, Matey Konstantinov

Cinematography: Emil Christov

Cast: Zachary Baharov (Moth), Tanya Ilieva (Ada), Vladimir Penev (Slug), Mihail Mutafov (Van Wurst The Eye), Djoko Rossich (Father Todor)

Nominations and Awards

  • Feature Film Selection 2008