Making the daily trip from Nice, where she roomed at the Villa Saint-Exupery, an all-ages hostel worth a stay in itself, The Sofia Echo’s Features Editor Magdalena Rahn perused the 60th Festival de Cannes, searching out Bulgarian participation and opinions -- and not catching a glimpse of anyone famous. This year’s event took place from May 16 to 27.


It’s not as if Andrey Paounov has a penchant for nature films or anything, it’s just that, as he put it, while sitting one sunny afternoon on the patio behind the Bulgarian pavilion at the Festival de Cannes, where the director’s second documentary - The Mosquito Problem & Other Stories - was shown as part of la Semaine Internationale de la Critique, he has “no imagination, so we stick with something like insects”.

Nor are his films about insects. His first full-length film, Georgi i Peperoudite/Georgi and the Butterflies, presented a Bulgarian psychiatrist in charge of a mental home for men.

The Mosquito Problem & Other Stories talks about mosquitoes (actually, the film’s underlying theme is the recurrent mosquito hordes that plague the Danubian town of Belene, but that’s because, while researching and getting footage for another project, Paounov and team found that residents “like to talk about mosquitoes because they don’t like to talk about other things”. Namely, the construction of the Belene nuclear power plant, a communist-era concentration camp on an island in the middle of the river, and the steady rate of depopulation).

What started as telling the story of one person became the story of a town over the two years that he and cinematographers Boris Missirkov, Georgi Bogdanov and producer Martichka Bozhilova - all of the Sofia film company Agitprop - were exploring the original theme. Mosquito took three-and-a-half years from what became its start to being ready for release.

Even then, Paounov said, he was not preparing the film to be ready at the present date. But when Semaine Internationale de la Critique jury member Emma Baus saw the unfinished version in Sofia earlier this year, she knew it was what she had been looking for as the single documentary possible to be screened at the 2007 Cannes film festival.

“I was looking for a cinematographic documentary with a good screenplay, not just a documentary,” she said at a question-and-answer session after the film’s premiere on May 18 at Miramar cinema. “Through the small lens of the camera, we can see the entire collapse of Eastern Europe.”

According to Paounov, “we try to make blockbuster science films, but we always fail in making social-human drama, which turns into comedy, and the last one (Mosquito) turned into a musical as well”.

He said that he himself was “eaten alive by mosquitoes” while in Belene, and that the people there were not very open, so mosquito talk was a good icebreaker.

“You cannot talk about the (concentration) camp, because they get nervous about it; you cannot talk about the nuke, because they think you want to do something against it - but when you talk about mosquitoes, they really open up. ... It’s left over from all those years when people did not really talk about anything - outside of Sofia, nothing has really changed.”

As for Paounov’s past, he left Bulgaria soon after democracy arrived, when “Bulgaria was going to hell”, so he continued film studies in Prague - he had been at NATFIZ in Sofia - and worked as a bartender. This was followed by a number of years in the US, where he did odd professions, with brief spells in Bulgaria, interspersed with some random filmmaking projects. Best known from this time would be Lucy Tsak Tsak, a two-minute documentary about a Bulgarian woman who worked her life as a slate clapper for films.

This set him on the documentary trail: he had an idea, he and Bozhilova went to The Netherlands to seek out funding, and, voila, Georgi and the Butterflies.

Still, he said: “I never really considered or consider myself seriously as a director. I like to think of films more as projects you get crazy about and not as a job. I pretty much do only my own projects.”

As one who has had a life outside of his home country, he was afforded a wider, and more long-term, view of life in Bulgaria. “There is a very big problem,” he said. “Bulgarians have learned bad habits in the years following democracy not to like and support Bulgarian things, arts. For them, the branding of a Bulgarian thing means bad. It’s a lack of self-confidence.”

Paounov did not seem to be affected by such feelings; animated and quirky he would jump from one conversation to the next, and back to the interview, all while smoking one Gaulois after another. But he’s not ritualistic about this, or his drink or his toothpaste. Conferring with Missirkov, who was sitting across the table, Paounov confirmed that the brand of toothpaste he was using at the festival - something pink, with an image of a bear on the tube, something for children, a remnant of communism - had been a treat for the little ones during the Bulgarian socialist era, as sugared things were rare.

And like the rose wine he was favouring at the festival, like the pink paste recalling 25 years ago, like the first impression he had of Cannes being like running down Slunchev Bryag, Paounov will uncover that storyline, whatever it is.

The Mosquito Problem & Other Stories (2007, 100’)
Director: Andrey Paounov
Screenplay: Lilia Topouzova, Andrey Paounov
Cinematography: Boris Missirkov, Georgi Bogdanov
Sound: Momchil Bozhkov
Editing: Orlin Rouevski
Music: Todor Pernikov, Ivo Paounov
Producer: Martichka Bozhilova/Agitprop, co-produced with Filmtank Hamburg, ITVS, and ZDF/ARTE

In parallel to the Official Selection, the Festival de Cannes also runs non-competitive film programmes dedicated to discovering other aspects of cinema.

These range from the directorial debuts of the Camera d’Or and Cannes Classics, where historic winning films are screened, to the beach projections of Cinema de la Plage and the international variety of Tous les Cinemas du Monde

Started in 2005, this year’s Tous les Cinemas du Monde focused on Africa, Colombia, India, Lebanon, Poland and Slovenia. Each day, one country presented a range of its recent features and shorts. Perhaps in the future, Bulgaria will have this honour.

Talking with Mila Petkova at the Bulgarian pavilion at the Village International, she said that this year, 2007, the second that Bulgaria has had such representation, was seeing an increase in curiosity towards Bulgarian film, and Bulgaria as a location for filming - but “right now, it’s just interest”.

At the festival with Gergana Daskova - both women are head specialists for international issues at the Bulgarian National Film Centre - Petkova said that there was “interest from various people, with many just wandering through (the pavilion), but, thank God, there are also many professionals who are coming through and have concrete interest - producers, from all continents, Africa, all of Europe, America”.

She described the challenges of a small country like Bulgaria having a representative location. “It’s hard to have a pavilion - and expensive. You have to start organising early, as they go quickly, and you have to be financially stable.”

Two Bulgarian films premiered this year during the event’s 12 days, as part of la Semaine Internationale de la Critique: the documentary The Mosquito Problem & Other Stories, directed by Andrey Paounov, and the court-metrage Rabbit Troubles, directed by Kamen Kalev and Dimitar Mitovski.

This is the first time that Bulgaria has had a feature film screened since 1990.
Past Bulgarian films at the Festival de Cannes include:
Geroite na Shipka/Shipka Heroes, directed by Sergei Vassilyev in co-production with the Soviet Union, recipient of the 1955 Best Director award and a nomination for the Palme d’Or;
Tochka Purva/Item One, directed by Boyan Danovski, a 1956 Palme d’Or nominee;
Zemya/A Land (aka, Earth), based on the story by Elin Pelin, directed by Zahari Zhandov, a 1957 Palme d’Or nominee;
Zvezdi/Sterne (aka, Stars), an East Germany-Bulgaria co-production directed by Konrad Wolf, winner of the 1959 Prix du Jury and nominated for a Palme d’Or;
Tyutyun/Tobacco, directed by Nikola Korabov, nominated for a Palme d’Or in 1963;
Goreshto Pladne/Torrid Noon, directed by Zako Heskia, screened in the 1965 In Competition selection;
Chui Petela/Hark to the Cock, directed by Stefan Dimitrov, screned in the 1979 Semaine de la Critique;
Ovcharsko/Shepherds, a short by Hristo Kovachev, screened in the 1980 Quinzaine des Realisateurs;
Lagerut/The Camp, directed by Georgi Djulgerov, and Margarit i Margarita, directed by Nikolai Volev, both screened in the 1990 Quinzaine des Realisateurs; and
Vurnete Zaeka/Get the Rabbit Back, a short directed by Mitovski & Kalev, and Jivot sus Sofia/Life with Sofia, a short directed by Svelta Tsotsorkova, both in the selection of the 2005 Semaine de la Critique.