It's September, holidays are over, half the country has returned to Sofia and Camera EOOD, a Bulgarian film production company, is making sure that the good times do not end. Starting on September 2 2008, it will host free-of-charge nightly projections of contemporary Bulgarian movies in the open, at the empty pond-area in front of the decrepit monument at NDK (National Palace of Culture) in Sofia.

The initiative itself is called Kinoklub na Otkrito (Киноклуб на открито), meaning "cinema club in the open" - and that's just what it is. At a news conference held on September 1 at Sofia city hall, organiser Alexander Donev of Camera and deputy Sofia mayor Yordanka Fandukova presented the project, which is supported by Sofia municipality's Culture programme.

Donev said that the films included in the programme were meant to stir up discussion.

"Collective film viewing provides a different experience, and after, discussions take place naturally. This is something that does not happen in front of a computer screen or a TV," Donev said. The programme could go so far as to incite disputes, he said, noting that there would be nothing negative about such taking place.

Donev also expressed hopes that this avenue of film viewing would create discussions about the films themselves, and not so much the politics surrounding the making of Bulgarian films, which tends to spawn the majority of words in current society instead.

The accent is on variety, with all the films being made in 2001 or later - documentaries, short films, feature films, student films, independent Bulgarian films, and projects done with the National Film Centre.

The other idea of Kinoklub na Otkrito is to create a screen to popularise Bulgarian cinema, Donev said. "It's a hard battle to find screen time in cinemas, and the less and less cinemas there are, the harder it is to find projections of Bulgarian films," he said.

Also at the press conference, Fandukova said that Camera's open-air cinema project was one of the 48 projects that the municipality had decided to support in its first session of funds allocation for the municipal programme Culture. Seventy-eight entities total submitted proposals to the May session, which marked the start of the programme's revamp; the second session closed for proposals on August 31.

Kinoklub na Otkrito has an operational budget of about 75 000 leva; it received 20 000 leva from city hall.

The money comes from the one million leva allocated for the year for the Culture programme.

This is not the first time that Sofia municipality has supported Camera's work; Camera's current series Hushove (Хъшове, a term used to refer to Bulgarian immigrants in Romania in the late 19th century), based on the play by Ivan Vazov, has been being filmed with co-operation from the municipality.

With a starting time of 9pm - to be moved to 8.30pm as the month progresses and the nights become cooler - the targeted audience of Kinoklub na Otkrito is the younger public, though all are welcome; this also due to the location: the projections take place at the former El Cabana bar, now only a shack with a half-missing red roof and some rotten benches.

The glory of cinema knows no bounds.