13/12/2023 - After a break of nearly two years, 60 films are participating in the competition programmes, 21 of which are animations and 39 are documentaries

After a break of almost two years (the last edition was celebrated in February 2022 – see the news), the 27th Golden Rhyton Festival of Bulgarian Documentary and Animated Film, taking place from 14-21 December in the city of Plovdiv, is poised to showcase a record number of films.  

Besides titles that have already had their international premieres at festivals abroad, such as A Provincial Hospital [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Ilian Metev, Ivan Chertov a…
film profile], My Uncle Luben [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Nikola Boshnakov, Georgi-Ja…
film profile], No Place for You in Our Town [+see also:
film review
trailer
film profile], The Cars We Drove into Capitalism [+see also:
film review
film profile] and The Last Seagull [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Tonislav Hristov
film profile], some of the most highly anticipated features among the documentaries are the opening film, Weimar Express by Milena Fuchedzhieva, a hybrid between documentary and animation on the writer’s seminar organised in 1941 by Joseph Goebbels and the Bulgarian connection to it; Maria Averina’s Flying with Fins [+see also:
interview: Maria Averina
film profile], on the work and complex life of a Bulgarian artist with an international career, Alzek Misheff; Pavel Vesnakov’s Georgi Gospodinov in the Shelter of Time, featuring Bulgaria’s most successful writer and latest Booker Prize winner; and Cinema Extremists by Boya Harizanova, on the pioneers who paved the way along the “thorny” path of Bulgarian cinema. Anri Koulev’s To Put It Mildly, based on Valeri Petrov’s famous children’s poem, is perhaps the most eagerly anticipated animated feature, alongside Spartak Yordanov’s short Depersonalization, which has just scooped the Jury Prize at the latest Animateka International Animated Film Festival in Ljubljana (see the news).

Along with the two competitions, the parallel Open Horizons programme includes 25 additional works that tackle important themes or adopt interesting approaches to filmmaking. Two films will pay homage to the figure of renowned Bulgarian filmmaker Binka Zhelyazkova on the occasion of her 100th birthday, and two others to the work of documentarian Malina Petrova, who passed away recently. Finally, a special screening will be dedicated to the digitally restored version of the silent documentary film from 1913 The Balkan War, as part of a project undertaken by the Bulgarian National Film Archive to digitise cinema classics.

The jury is chaired by writer and playwright Teodora Dimova, animation filmmaker and the winner of the Golden Rhyton for Animated Film in 2022 Svilen Dimitrov, art scholar and academic Galina Lardeva, film critic Genoveva Dimitrova, and documentary filmmaker Petya Nakova, who won the Special Jury Award at the festival’s previous edition.