A film by Geneviève Dulude-De Celles
With: Galin Stoev, Ekatarina Stanina, Sofia Stanina, Chiara Caselli, Christian Bégin, Michelle Tzontchev, Mart Lachev, Nikolay Mutafchiev, Svetlana Yancheva, Maria-Radena Bozhkova
A viral video of an 8-year-old Bulgarian artist catches the eye of a major art collector, and Mihail is sent there, 30 years after leaving his home country, to assess the value of the girl’s work and confront ghosts from his past.
Our rate : ★★
An interesting, sincere actor, a theme reminiscent of Atom Egoyan’s Ararat or Felicia’s Journey, or Allan Parker’s Angela’s Ashes, focusing on roots, that deep feeling that can cause a person to unconsciously suffer from a sense of uprootedness, even many years later, after having put aside a whole part of their life following exile, even if it was entirely voluntary. Mihail (Frenchified as Michel) unknowingly refuses to confront his past, but an unexpected professional event and a minor argument with his daughter, whom he protects, awaken a buried feeling in him, a need to return to the land he fled, whose language he still knows, but on which he now looks with bitterness, that of a horizon now blocked. Over time, his worrying local roots and lack of future have been replaced by a sense of uprootedness and detachment, but also by withdrawal and an excess of certainty. The time for reconciliation has come. Geneviève Dulude-De Celles, despite her young age, tackles a subject made all the more complicated by the fact that she is talking about a country that must be partly foreign to her; in any case, there is no indication that she herself has any Bulgarian ties. That said, she is supported by a Bulgarian screenwriter. While the first images, which are relatively folkloric or touristy, fall into the trap of being overly external, the quality of the performance by the lead actor, Galin Staev, the embodiment he brings to the role, the sincerity that emerges from his silences, in his gaze, but also when the notes of Bulgarian music come back to him, is worth the entire film, in all its sensoriality. The film’s brief reflection on art, while not uninteresting (somewhat reminiscent of Dahomey, without its assertive tone), accompanies and frames the narrative, making the feelings explored more credible to us.