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Cast & Crew
- Regie
- Drehbuch
- Kamera
- SchnittZachary Baharov (Moth)
Statement Regisseur
Contemporary Bulgarian film deals mainly with every-day-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.
