From the Ruins Risen Newly
- Series: EUROPE IN SHORTS
By Tamar Noort. “I’m happy to contribute to the rebirth of the Bulgarian cinema“, director Stephan Komandarev stated last year, when his film THE WORLD IS BIG AND SALVATION LURKS AROUND THE CORNER collected not one but two prices at the Sofia Film Festival. Actually this wasn’t the first time the Bulgarian cinema has been reborn. As unknown as it still may be to many Europeans, its history reaches far back.
From art to educational objectives to propaganda
Since 1903 resourceful merchants have travelled this land with portable projectors – the enthusiasm they encountered was so enormous that five years later the first permanent cinema was built. In the following decades it survived all the bombings and the political upheavals, and it is still in use even today. The first operating company, called “Modern Theatre”, spread over all of Bulgaria and dominated the balkans and the Middle East as the biggest film distributor up until the middle of the 1920s. This was also the time when the first Bulgarian films were made – mostly by Vasil Gendov, a theatre man who would act as well as direct. Gendov told melodramatic tales from the big city and obviously hit the nerve of his times. But all the creative power of the new medium didn’t stay in one hand for long. The government stated educational objectives and took to projecting documentary features in order to transport knowledge. The National Film Laboratory produced those movies and thus lay the foundations for the state-controlled Bulgarian film industry. Which was quite prosperous: In the middle of the 20th century up to 50 films were produced annually (today this number has shrunk to about five to seven films per year), most of them heroic stories to legitimize and confirm the claim to power of the socialist government. The educational objectives had become propaganda.
Bulgarian filmmakers found themselves in a paradoxical situation: On the one hand they were immensely supported as opinion makers, and their working conditions were excellent. Within the Bojana studios in Sofia elaborate production facilities were installed, with only the best equipment. These famous studios still exist today although they were bought in 2005 by a Californian production company.
Outstanding Education in Film
Young people in Bulgaria could get an outstanding education in film – for example at the still-existing NAFTA, the renowned National Academy for Theatre & Film Arts. The government even sent filmmakers into the West to visit festivals. They may not have had much artistic freedom, but they were given all the tools of the trade – which they used to build a deeper level of meaning behind the official ideology. The Bulgarian cinema of the 60s, 70s and 80s found new ways to articulate its artistic intentions in spite of the state’s tight controls. THE PEACH THIEF (1964) by Vulo Radev or THE GOAT'S HORN (1972) by Metodi Andonov have become bona fide classics. This resulted in a very idiosyncratic film culture, that nonetheless completely lost it’s footing once the socialist regime was gone. Many filmmakers didn’t manage to stand up to the striking Hollywood movies with their own more subtle narrative approaches.
Today, 20 years after the fall of the iron curtain, there is a new film culture emerging in Bulgaria. The development programs of the National Film Centre once again provide some funding from the state – which this time around isn’t linked to a certain ideology. The second big national film fund is the Bulgarian national television. Together they invest a little over six million Euros each year. But more important than the money is the new confidence of the Bulgarian filmmakers. Movies like MILA FROM MARS (2004, Zornitsa Sophia), LADY Z (2005, Georgi Djulgerov) and MONKEYS IN WINTER (2006, Milena Andonova) did not only recapture the Bulgarian cinema audience for local films, but also the international film markets.
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