03/11/2014 - The €1 million drama starts shooting in February in Northern Bulgaria

Ralitza Petrova is in pre-production with her first feature, Godless [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Ralitza Petrova
film profile], produced by Rossitsa Valkanova for KLAS Film (Bulgaria), and co-produced by Laurence Clerc and Olivier Théry-Lapiney for Alcatraz Films (France). Shooting will start in mid-February in Bulgaria’s Vratsa region and will last for 30 days. The film’s DoP is Canadian cinematographer Chayse Irvin (Medeas [+see also:
film review
trailer
film profile]).

The screenplay, written by Petrova herself, will explore a world “without God, a world where an emotionless nurse, looking after the elderly with dementia, traffics their ID cards on the black market of identity theft”. When the only patient she is fond of is imprisoned because of her, the main character tries to set things right, but her decision will have unexpected consequences.

“I want to explore the frail intimacy between brutality and empathy, through the moral dilemmas of a generation raised with a lost belief in goodness,” Petrova told Cineuropa, adding that Godless will tackle “the fall of an ordinary person, forced to act against their good conscience”. The director intends to shoot her film with non-professional actors “whose life experience is close to that of the characters”.

The project has been granted financial support by the Bulgarian National Film Center, and in 2013, it received one of the main production awards at the TorinoFilmLab (see the news). Petrova is known for her shorts, which have been selected at some of the most important film festivals. Her short Rotten Apple snagged the Prix UIP Berlin at the Berlinale in 2007, thus automatically receiving a nomination for the European Film Awards.