Bulgarian submissions for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film

Three novels deal with the mentality of the children, their agitations, and the merry and sad things in their everyday life. The movie is created with a lot of humor, cheerfulness, and great love for the kids.

After witnessing his wife's rape and murder during Ottoman rule, a traumatized Bulgarian knight, Kara Ivan, retreats to the mountains where he raises his young daughter alone among the goats.

This film is a dramatic, colorful parable about migration from the countryside to the urban areas, revealing the deep-rooted attachment of the peasant Ivan Efreytorov to the patriarchal way of life. The newly built dam has submerged his village and his fellow villagers move in prefabricated blocks of flats in the neighboring town. Left alone with his father and his son, Efreytorov is resisting fiercely the imminent change and does not want to leave his native house. Though the native village has disappeared under the water of lake, it still exists in his memories. In his mind's eye he sees the mythological scenes which combine in almost surrealist fashion with his visions of the contemporary world, memories of his dead wife and images of nature in which animals - the dog, the cow, the horse - figure very prominently. After the death of his father and the escape of his son to the town, Efreytorov sees that all his ties with the past are broken. The implacable march of time compels the man of tradition to beat a heartbreaking retreat.

In this picture, the barrier epitomizes the line between reality and dreams, the pattern of harmony and happiness. The delicate, pretty, sensitive Dorotea and the sedate middle-aged composer Antoni meet by chance. He gives her shelter in his house. Famous composer falls under the spell of young Dorothea: A pretty, thin-skinned, though quite an eccentric girl. Antoni becomes the witness of a series of strange and wonderful events. She is maintaining she is able to fly, drawing him into her half real world, when miracles are worked. It turns out that Dorotea has the supernatural gift of divining and forecasting people thoughts and intentions. Gradually Antoni overcomes his initial confusion and becomes used to the parapsychological states of the girl. He penetrates her acutely sensitive inner world where the supernatural becomes natural and the impossible possible. And when he learns that Dorotea can fly, he joins her and flies with her. During this experiment he feels a surge of creativity and happiness for the first time in many years. Is all this real or imaginary? Embarrassed, as he is, he leaves on a short trip, and when finally resolved to come back to her, it is too late. Why is it that Dorotea is found dead apparently having fallen after one of her flights?

This is an epic screen presentation showing the creation, the consolidation and the power of First Bulgarian Kingdom and the first Bulgarian ruler Khan Asparuh.

This film is about an imaginary actors exam. In order to choose the best one the exam jury uses even immoral ways of selecting - spying, making conflicts, humiliating the applicants, taking advantage of its power.

In the 17th century, a Bulgarian Christian region is selected by the Ottoman rulers to serve as an example of conversion to Islam. A Janissary who was kidnapped from the village as a boy is sent to force the reluctant inhabitants to convert. The Turkish governor seeks a peaceful solution, but ultimately torture, violence, and rebellion break out.

Margarit and Margarita are high school senior students. They are madly in love. And so proud and independent that they are often in trouble with their parents and teachers. They quit school to live life their own way, only to face a world or corruption and brutality. Margarit would make no compromise and would not get involved in a game with shady rules. Margarita is more willing to do so in the name of their future together. A big manager takes her under his wing and shows himself to be a corrupt womanizer. Margarit cannot stand the debauchery of their 'protector' and kills him. After his sentence he puts an end to his life and unable to live her life this way, so does Margarita.

This is a picture of some horrible events in Bulgaria after the WW2, when as if in the name of the future dictatorship, rules came.

Mother (Lily), son (Malín) and stepfather, and a poor relation between the latter two. Lily always refused to tell who was Malín's real father. But Malín gradually uncovered the secret. Lily and Ivan were very much in love but never had any opportunity to sleep together. After Ivan was drafted Lily disappeared. She was raped by the son of a communist official and became pregnant. The People's Tribunal decided that the rapist and the raped should marry. To avoid the shame of being an unmarried mother Lily resigned to her fate. But the husband did not even attend the wedding ceremony and feast. After this insult Lily refused to sleep with him. Then he sent her in a concentration camp. She witnessed a prisoner being tortured to death. Later she was confined to a mental hospital. But she made it clear to a young doctor that she would do anything for him if he helped her out. He accepted the deal. But Lily's freedom might not have lasted long if she had posed as the respectable married woman she was. Though the price of concealing it was also heavy. If she took a real job her identity would be disclosed. She could only take poorly paid homework. She had to be glad that any man would accept her. And she could never tell the truth to her son.

Ivan's best friend, Kamen, is in an American hospital, in coma after an accident. Since he's denied a visa to the USA and can't stay by his side in his last moments, Ivan decides to set off for Bulgaria countryside, taking the camera Kamen has given him. There's a legend in Kamen's place of birth - a small mountain village - that one song could bring people back to life. Ivan starts a journey to find it and record it, collecting a myriad of stories along the way. Will he succeed?

It is a story about a group of friends who live in a small seaport town. Their lifestyle is rigorous, their joys are simple and their sex life is raw. Their concepts of man's dignity, friendship and duty are wrong and primitive. The film helps us to understand and forgive them.

High in the mountains of Macedonia a team of young film makers are making a documentary about Katerina Vandeva - a descendant of an ancient and very famous family. Several former state and party functionaries interfere in the filmmaking in the hopes of manipulating Katerina's confessions for their own purposes. Nikola, the director, and his friends have to make the choice - whether to compromise with their consciences and their art, (as normally happens here in the Balkans), or whether to preserve Katerina's message.

Two German-Jewish children flee Nazi Germany in the early 1940s and try to escape to Palestine via Bulgaria. When their uncle dies during the journey, they are taken in by a troupe of travelling performers.

A 16-old girl runs away from a dangerous man and gets into a faraway village near the border. Soon she finds out the only inhabitants there - nine old men and women - make their living by growing marijuana and the village is actually an illegal plantation belonging to the man she runs away from. However, she decides to stay there and nothing remains the same. A girl is afraid of her past, both disgusting and attracting her. She is afraid of her present, both suffocating her and giving her wings. And she is afraid of the future as it projects both her nightmares and her dreams. This film is about the only 'bullet against fear' - love.

This is a story of strange, impossible, inexplicable love between a Muslim Turk woman and a non-Muslim Bulgarian man. Ivan (the Bulgarian) is a pure and romantic young fellow, who gets caught up in the so-called "regeneration process" (when ethnic Turks' names were forcibly changed to Bulgarian ones).

Dona, Lukrecie and Tana - three women of different origins and destinies, whose stories unfold at different times. The tale of the Romany woman Dona begins in the 1960s. The only assets this beautiful and vital woman has are her three children fathered by different men. In order to secure a livelihood for them, she moves in with an older, but disabled man, who turns out to be a pervert. Ten years later, the ambitious Lukrecie is trying to avoid employment in the village. After she becomes pregnant by a prospective suitor, she meets an attractive young man who offers her a life abroad, something she had always dreamed of. Lukrecie resolves her situation in the most appalling way. Tana, the wife of a prosperous businessman, vainly longs to have a child. On the advice of a friend, she goes off to a spa, whose miraculous reputation is attributable to a skillful masseur. Her husband, however, is unmoved by the joyful news. Three stories offering three insights into the tragic outcome of relationships between men and women, which give rise to both longed-for and unwanted children.

A thirteen year old kid, "the boy", lives and works in a cemetery. The cemetery is his whole life, and growing up with the dead instills in him an obsession and respect for death. His friends depend on him: An unhappy old man, a former political prisoner yearning for death, and makeup artist for deceased, a former artist who dreams of painting a masterpiece. The boy does what he can to help them. The old man attempts suicide, but upon learning the date of his death and seeing his beautiful plot chosen for him by the boy, he is able to bear his life. Upon meeting the beautiful Maria, "the boy" gives the former artist a surprise date with her. But when Maria and the artist become closer, the boy realizes that she is the daughter of the old man. The kid thinks the old man would die unhappy if he knew of her existence and so decides to hide the truth.

Moth is freed on parole after spending time in prison on wrongful conviction of murder. Jailed shortly before the Bulgarian communist coup of 1944, he now finds himself in a new and alien world - the totalitarian Sofia of the 60s. His first night of freedom draws the map of a diabolical city full of decaying neighborhoods, gloomy streets and a bizarre parade of characters.

The story of Alex, who, with the help of his charismatic grandfather, Bai Dan, embarks on a journey in search of his real self.

Through Georgi (a juvenile) and Itso (an adult), we take a quick glance (about one and a half hour quick) at what happens in post cold-war Bulgaria.