17/02/2026 - BERLINALE 2026: Geneviève Dulude-De Celles crafts a Bulgarian-based story on concealed wounds and the resurfacing of an interred identity

Displacement today is a somewhat banalised human condition that countless people experience in the global world; it’s so normalised that it barely gets questioned. What happens to a child who spent the first formative years of their life in their birthplace, before suddenly being carried off to another part of the Earth, forcibly cutting ties with their homeland and those fragile first memories of places, smells and tastes that together weave the fabric of personality?

The opening scene of Geneviève Dulude-De Celles’ Nina Roza, freshly presented in the main competition of the Berlinale, features a grown-up Bulgarian woman with such a background (Michelle Tzontchev), who now feels lost and returns to her father (a defector driven more by a traumatic emotion than material well-being), who brought her to Canada a long time ago, in search of answers about her disconnect from the world and the severed ties with their native Bulgaria.

After completing two documentary features and winning the Crystal Bear for Best Film in the Generation section of Berlin with her debut fiction, A Colony – a coming-of-age story about an estranged girl struggling with a hostile world – Dulude-De Celles undertakes, in her second fictional outing, the risky venture of situating further lost characters in a land she barely knows, yet which she approaches with a curiosity that transcends an exotic gaze.

The protagonist here is actually Mihail (Galin Stoev), the Bulgarian émigré father, comfortably settled in Canada as an art curator and pretending to have long forgotten his roots. Convinced by his boss, he returns to Bulgaria after 28 years, following the trail of a little girl in the countryside, Nina (played by twin sisters Ekaterina and Sofia Stanina), who supposedly creates masterpieces in a barn. Whether she truly has talent or whether everything has been fabricated by her poor relatives in order to establish her on the Western market is what he is trying to find out.

Nina has already been sniffed out by an Italian curator, Giulia (Chiara Caselli), and Mihail thus finds himself confronted simultaneously by her cynical business ethics and by his own in the talent hunt, while at the same time slowly surrendering to homesickness – experiencing flashbacks of moments of family happiness spent with his late wife, and even getting the urge to call his angry sister (Svetlana Yancheva), whom he hasn’t seen for a long time – all against the background of a soundtrack permeated by nostalgic, locally popular schlager songs. Nina’s refusal to intuitively play the game becomes the trigger for Mihail to question the severing of his own bonds with his irreplaceable origins.

Perhaps because of the heightened attention to detail when recreating a foreign environment, Dulude-De Celles has crafted a film that at certain points feels more Bulgarian than many Bulgarian films themselves – especially those that try to shine on the global market, akin to Giulia’s ambitions to capitalise on Nina’s art. And through Nina’s character, the director dares to raise a question that has seemingly been forgotten in a world of constant mobility: why abandon a beautiful country, along with the people you love?

An actor and theatre director working in France, and himself a long-term emigrant, Galin Stoev bears the emotional core of the film and feels authentic in his wavering between reason and longing, while the non-professional actors – from the Stanina sisters to the episodic village characters – coupled with DoP Alexandre Nour Desjardins’s melancholic camera, add to the density and texture of a setting that encompasses mourning the irretrievable.

Nina Roza was produced by Canada’s Colonelle Films, in co-production with Bulgaria’s Ginger Light and PREMIERstudio, Italy’s UMI Films and Belgium’s Echo Bravo. Its world sales are handled by Best Friend Forever.