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Avé

Written by Arnold Barkus and Konstantin Bojanov

Directed by Konstantin Bojanov

Bulgaria, 2011

Bulgarian film Avé is the fiction feature debut of its director Konstantin Bojanov. A road movie, it is concerned with two hitchhiking youths whose paths collide, leading them to travel together to a small town close to the Romanian border for the wake of the friend of one of them. The boy, Kamen, meets eponymous girl Avé at road side, both intrigued and repelled by her tendency to lie her way in and out of situations. Latching to him despite his attempts to escape her during his journey, she constantly reinvents a new story for their relationship and her past for everyone they meet, when they in fact don’t even know each other’s names. Never warning Kamen of her detours into fiction, she paints the boy as both her brother, her perverted boyfriend, and the...

A young hitchhiker meets an intriguing girl with a penchant for fabulous lies.

Kamen (Ovanes Torosian) is hitchhiking by the side of the road when he meets Avé (Angela Nedialkova). Both are trying to get to Ruse on the north eastern Bulgarian border, so, despite Kamen's hesitation, it makes sense that they share rides. Once they are in a car together, Kamen is shocked when Avé begins to make up stories about him as if they have known each other all their lives. The further they travel together, the more extreme her lies become, yet although he makes clear his rising anger he can't...

★★★★☆ Winner of the Best Debut Feature award at this year's Raindance Film Festival, Viktor Chouchkov's Tilt (2011) may well be flawed and occasionally cringe-worthy, but it's also fantastically fun and formally assured. Set in the late 1980s as Bulgaria's political landscape was in a state of flux, the film details the tumultuous relationship between young lovers Stash (Yavor Baharov) and Becky (Radina Kardjilova) as they experience the hardships existing on both sides of the 1990 free election that dissects the film.

Threatened by Becky's crooked cop father, Stash and his pornography-pedalling friends emigrate to Germany, the fall of the Berlin wall promising a better life for the teenagers. Finding themselves digging graves and robbing pawn shops to keep afloat, the boys decide to venture back to their hometown to reunite the young couple.

From the first scene - set in the boys' wonderfully designed porn cellar - Tilt establishes a momentum that never subsides,...

Christo Christov, Ovanes Torosian, Eastern Plays (top); Kristbjörg Kjeld, Mamma Gogo (bottom) Fridrik Thor Fridriksson's Mamma Gogo and Kamen Kalev's Eastern Plays will have two additional Academy screenings on Dec. 26 at the Wilshire Screening Room in Beverly Hills. Iceland's entry for the 2011 Best Foreign Language Film Oscar, Mamma Gogo will be presented at 5 p.m; Bulgarian entry Eastern Plays will screen at 7 p.m. Starring Kristbjörg Kjeld as Mamma Gogo, an elderly woman suffering from Alzheimer's disease and Hilmir Snær Guðnason as a film director, Mamma Gogo is a semi-autobiographical drama (with humorous touches) about how the director copes with his mother's illness. Director Fridriksson's mystical Children of Nature was shortlisted in the Best Foreign Language Film category in 1991. A study in ethnic and nationalistic bigotry, Eastern Plays tells the story of three people — two Bulgarian brothers and a Turkish immigrant — brought together by a brutal xenophobic [...]...

2009 Tokyo Film Festival Awards 2009 Tokyo Film Festival: October 17-25, 2009 In Kamen Kalev’s Bulgarian drama Eastern Plays, two estranged brothers are unexpectedly brought together after they play opposing roles in a racist beating — Georgi is a new member of a neo-Nazi group; Itso, a drug-addicted artist, rescues the victimized Turkish family. Compounding matters, Georgi (Ovanes Torosian) starts to question his place in the neo-nazi movement while Itso (Tokyo best actor winner Christo Christov) falls for the Turkish girl he saved. Eastern Plays is the second film featuring neo-nazi characters to win a top international film festival prize this week. Nicolo Donato’s Danish drama Brotherhood, about two neo-nazis who fall in love with one another, was [...]...