22/11/2024 - Eliza Petkova’s new documentary adopts the point of view of five animals in a remote Bulgarian village

Bulgarian filmmaker Eliza Petkova has always stunned festival viewers with her idiosyncratic way of rendering the everyday poetic. Her feature debut, Zhaleika [+see also:
film review
trailer
film profile], which won the Generation 14Plus Award at the Berlinale in 2016, told a fictional story about a girl in mourning as she navigates the strict societal codes of a small Bulgarian village. In 2021, she returned to the same place in the Pirin Mountains of Bulgaria to make a documentary film – Mayor, Shepherd, Widow, Dragon – from the stories people told her. Now, Silent Observers [+see also:
interview: Eliza Petkova
film profile], showing in IDFA’s Luminous strand, concludes this place-bound trilogy from the point of view of five animals: a horse, a dog, a goat, a cat and a donkey.

In the film’s opening scene, a feline sneaks through an open window and jumps over a bed where a dead man’s body lies, so that family and friends can say their final goodbyes. Once the widow shoos the mischievous cat away, people start gossiping about how it has prevented his soul from passing over. Superstition is rife in this small village, and the locals imbue their animals with it, but the film never makes that entanglement a laughing matter. All of the animals in Silent Observers are part of domestic everyday life, and some of them are also a means for labour, like the donkey and the horse. But even when their roles are contested, the documentary invites us to check our own biases when encountering animals on screen.

Together with her long-standing cinematographer, Constanze Schmitt, Petkova makes sure the film immerses its audience in a world that is only semi-familiar. By keeping the camera at animal eye level and holding them in close-ups – while people’s faces are almost always off screen – Schmitt crafts an equal, reciprocal relationship between the human viewer and the non-human characters on screen. In a way, the camera remains neutral (as in, it refrains from simply substituting a “human” shot scale with its “non-human” counterpart) and curious throughout, making use of shallow and deep focus to bring out the natural light and shadows in a pictorial way. These are animal portraits, but they aren’t beautified: the animals themselves are already beautiful, even Gosho the sickly donkey or Matza, the troublemaker cat that the villagers are always complaining about. For the eerie sound design, Petkova trusted five artists – Adam Goodwin, Anil Eraslan, Jung-Jae Kim, Lukas Akintaya and Shingo Masuda – and their five compositions to reflect each and every one of the central animals.

While Silent Observers is admittedly observational in its form, with little to no interference from the humans on screen, and even less from the filmmakers, the respect it exudes is paramount. The hybrid nature of the movie has given Petkova the freedom to craft her own rendition of a fragile yet long-standing relationship between humans and animals, mediated through cinema’s recording devices, and the result is remarkable: a gentle, sentient work that’s unafraid to hand film’s anthropocentric supremacy to animals, those who have always observed us, silently.

Silent Observers was produced by Bulgarian company Red Carpet in co-production with Germany’s Wood Water Films.