The Sofia Film Fest once again includes this year documentaries from the Millenium Film Festival in Brussels, organized by two Bulgarians, who live there – Zlatina Ruseva and Liubomir Georgiev. Movies are being screened, related to the problems of mankind across the globe and the main goals of the millennium – overcoming of poverty, education, ecology. Zlatina Ruseva is famous documentary-maker and her movies, tackling different topics have seen lots of festivals and TV shows. “I do respect Sofia Film Fest,” the director told a RB reporter. “I see it as a cultural phenomenon, as it has done a lot for the popularization of Bulgarian cinema. I wanted to see here high level documentaries, devoted to the major problems of the époque, such as the Millenium selection. That’s how we started and it is a tradition now.”

“We screen 4 movies this year that I find really interesting,” Zlatina Ruseva points out. “The Captain and His Pirate is the most curious one in my opinion. It is a true story – a German ship was captured by Somali pirates and kept for four months. The globe new nothing on the ship’s destiny. It is a movie on the complicated relations between two worlds, between the captain and the boss of the pirates. This is the first movie ever trying to comprehend the personalities of the terrorists, as well as their reasons for the crimes. We see then that a very complicated organization is the background, with its own ideology. On the other hand the movie shows the relations between two men, who are more intelligent than the others, I might say. They are both lonely and find themselves in a situation they want to solve…”

The Belgian Ion movie is emblematic, according to the director. It is the story of a Romanian emigrant, residing in Brussels. Just like most visually impaired people he developed unique hearing. That was how he entered the system for listening in different crimes. However, the movie raises the moral issue with the intrusion of intimacy in relations among people. The Iranian The Driver and the Fox is a curious and funny movie, while the fourth one in the selection /WAVUMBA from Holland/ takes us back to The Old Man and the Sea of Hemingway:

“An old African fisherman and a changing environment, where organic world starts to disappear due to the huge fishing business of the large companies, leaving lots of fishermen with no living. This is an old man, who lives actually with his myth on the huge sharks that he has caught with his bare hands. While expecting the end of his life, he also waits for the big shark again. This is a very strong metaphor, a really beautiful piece of art…”

Zlatina Ruseva is also working on her own movie. She hopes to finish it by the end of the year. “It is a movie on memory, on all these things that happened in the last century – all the serious cataclysms that Europe went through. We seem to have lost the memory in quite a short period. The world has changed too much. I think that we don’t have a future without knowing the past. This movie is a message to the young generation, because in my opinion it is essential for young people to know history,” the director says in conclusion.

English Version: Zhivko Stanchev