For the third consecutive year, from October 12 to 18, the Bulgarian capital is playing host to the hottest “biting” documentaries, lined up in the Sofia Biting Docs Festival. The event is organized by the Pozor association. The festival was created in 2013 with the aim of telling stories that will provoke viewers, give them food for thought so that they may share their own thoughts during the discussions organized after the screenings.

To begin with, the event was part of the programme of Europe’s biggest documentary film festival One World in Prague, the Czech Republic. But as of its second year, the organizers decided to make it an independent programme, featuring films, hand-picked for the Bulgarian audience. “This year there are 14 films,” explains Zdravko Grigorov from Pozor association.

“One of the topics we have highlighted this year is a healthy diet and we shall be showing two such films. The first is the Czech Sugar Blues, a film about the huge quantities of sugar we consume without knowing it, because sugar is an ingredient in all kinds of food. The other film is the American Food Chains which shows the mountains of food chain commodities and how these commodities influence us as consumers, as well as our incessant urge to fill our baskets at stores, without actually needing all of these products. The festival has an environmental focus. This year we are opening the festival with one such film – the Green Dream, a Bulgarian-Canadian production by Bulgarian director Maya Yotsova, who has been living in Canada for years. The film makes a comparison between the urban environment and the green spaces of her home town Sofia and Montreal. The second screening of Green Dream will be on 15 October at the Czech cultural centre, after which viewers will be able to meet and talk to architects and landscape experts about how Sofia can become a more beautiful and greener city.”

These discussions are an essential part of Sofia Biting Docs. There will be such a discussion after the showing of Still Tibet and the opening of the photograph exhibition The faces of Tibet by photographer Miguel Angel Cano. Cano will be at the Cinema House in person to talk about the problem of Tibet with viewers. On 14 October at the Czech cultural centre is the screening of Together Forever, a documentary that offers a different angle to the life of a family living deep in the woods – the children do not go to school and their parents home school them. A discussion will be open on whether such a life is possible in our day and age.

According to Zdravko Grigorov, we must not expect these films to serve solutions to problems in society and nature on a platter. Their aim is to highlight different problems or just to help us glean more information about things happening around us. The organizers say that the Bulgarian public is not accustomed to watching documentaries and it takes much more effort to bring audiences to cinema halls at such festivals. And yet, the Bulgarian audience does have its own preferences.

“Bulgarians are very much interested in travel and adventure. Since the festival’s beginning we have noticed that travel films bring in the biggest audience. That is why this year we have lined up several such films. Rediscover India is a film about a group of young Indians who rediscover their country within the space of two months. This is a film many will enjoy, because it shows India to be a very colourful country. Another such film is Between the Peaks about the life of three young people working as volunteers in Central America. Their objective is to conquerAconcagua peak in Argentina but their story takes many and interesting turns and twists.”

But the highlight in this year’s festival is Banksy Does New York – an experiment called Better Out Than In by phantom artist Banksy, who decided to paint on buildings in several different parts of New York over 31 consecutive days to express his views. The film follows the experiment through, without ever showing Banksy’s face, but showcasing his incredible graffiti.

English version: Milena Daynova