A father’s absence in a daughter’s life is currently a hot topic in European cinema. In Bulgaria alone, My Father’s Shoes is the second take on the subject this year. After Ralitza Petrova’s aesthetically radical and somewhat macabre Lust, Hristo Simeonov’s tender debut, currently showing at the San Sebastian International Film Festival in the New Directors section, really stands out, unobtrusively, by proving itself to be remarkably insightful. Despite its overall deeply dramatic subject, it dares tackle the possible paradoxes of the situation with a touch of dark humour – without it detracting from the film’s depth, but on the contrary adding further layers and dimensions to the humanistic investigation conducted here.

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The conflict is made clear from the beginning, with no beating around the bush: while celebrating her birthday, Boyka (Tanya Shahova), now a middle-aged woman, learns that her long-divorced ex-husband – and her only daughter Mima’s father – is dead. However, as she does not want to know anything about him anymore and as his own sister (Vyara Kolarova) is reluctant too, it falls to Mima to go identify him at the morgue, even though she hasn’t seen him since she was four. Thus enters a corpse of whose identity none of his so-called close family members is entirely certain – a bizarre situation that fosters confusion and tension within each character, but also allows for some bitterly comic readings which help the viewer gain the necessary distance from the tragedy of what is unfolding, and arrive at more universal reflections.

Mima (Valeria Varbanova), herself pregnant with the child of a guy whom we only know as a voice on the phone calling from another country, seems to be torn between a vague, budding sense of duty with respect to the task of taking care of her father’s remains, her renewed grief over his absence from her life and his stubborn inaccessibility, even in death. She will also be the only one to wonder about his shoe size (so as to tidy him up for the funeral) and listen to old audio cassettes of him teaching her to play the accordion – the instrument she now uses to find comfort in her life and earn some money –, in an attempt to put together an image of his scattered personality, inevitably tied up to hers, while others try to identify him through physical marks.

This process of retrieving from amongst the dead the memory of someone who had been long gone anyway is a painful one, and newcomer Varbanova manages to express it silently, conveying devastation through her stooped posture and the profound sadness written on her face, which also visibly seeks approval in her mother’s gaze – for having lost her tenderness in the struggle for survival, the woman has turned her back on her femininity and grown harsh, too harsh. The contrast between the two actresses – a subtle Varbanova and an unrestrained, rather intense Shahova – is balanced by the almost transcendent presence of Kolarova, the three of them forming a cohesive and memorable performing ensemble. The music present in the film ( live or embedded in the soundtrack) uses low-key folklore elements to convey melancholic or more agitated moods in an understated manner, and the overall grey countryside landscape adds to the minor tones in the characters’ emotional journeys.

With all this, My Father’s Shoes still manages to avoid becoming another piece of Eastern miserabilism, thanks to Simeonov’s mature decision to give the floor to a more detached, pensive outlook through his absurdist sense of nuance, instead of focusing solely on the story´s dramatic dimension. Aware that the irreparable mistakes of the past are always easier to come to terms with when tempered by a touch of black humour, the director delivers an interpretation which gives the future a chance – which is why the film's ending strikes as rather bright, if not necessarily optimistic.

My Father’s Shoes was produced by Contrast Films (Bulgaria) and Films de Force Majeure (France).