Two films and one dramatic monologue will be presented at the Odeon cinema in Sofia tonight. What the audiences will see and hear will, no doubt, be a far cry from commonplace standards, in light of the fact that the works are by Lisa Boeva and renowned actor Itsko Fintsi. The two are from different generations but share many ideas which they have been working on together. Director, scriptwriter, cameraman and even continuity girl to her own films, Lisa usually opts for subjects close to the hearts of people of different generations and nationalities. And she literally travels the world to get to the truths she is after. Some years ago amateur footing from Itsko’s travels impressed her so much that she made a series of short films and won a prize. And that marked the beginning of her career. What is the audience to expect tonight? The answer from the young film director herself:

“We shall present the film Mona Lisa’s summer which provides the answer to the question why it is that this painting has become Leonardo’s universally acknowledged masterpiece. But that is the third part of the show we have planned. We shall start with a very short silent movie of just two minutes, featuring Itsko. Then comes his dramatic monologue. The works are an attempt to answer the questions “for’ and “against’ myths and whether we are able to “read” them as they should be read.”

“I have been asking myself these same questions for a long time.” Itsko Fintsi says. “As a young actor I dreamt of winning a major world award. I would try to figure out why some are able to climb so high. Even then I realized that it is not always the most famous actors or work of arts that are the best. But there is a cumulative effect in audiences that gives birth to myths. Much later I met Lisa and was astounded to find out that we shared the same views. She had collected a great deal of information about Da Vinci’s painting, she told me many things and I made up my mind to be part of the project. We traveled extensively in France and Italy, gathered material for the film, she edited it and added the voiceover. The result was an original documentary, a film that is unconventional and intriguing.”

Before telling us how Shakespeare’s name came to mixed up in the second part of the artistic project, Lisa explains what kind of research she and Itsko have been doing together:

“We have been working on this for some 7-8 years. For a long time I had no access to original Elizabethan literature. I had to surmount a series of obstacles before I could start working with the sources I wanted stored at a famous American library. I wrote an academic work trying to explain who William Shakespeare from Stratford upon Avon is, adducing evidence that he is not actually the author of the literature his name is ascribed to. I describe our hypotheses adducing facts showing who actually wrote these works. We had numerous telephone conversations with Ilya Gililov, author of the book The Shakespeare Game – it was the book’s translator Lyudmil Dimitrov who put us in touch with the Russian researcher. We uphold the same thesis, though there are some differences. We are planning to make a movie about this and hope to complete it by the end of next year.”

“What really surprised me was that we found a businessman with a very profound interest in that same topic. He told us what he had collected through the years and decided to finance the shoot on location – in all places connected with Shakespeare in England, Italy, Denmark, Greece,” Itsko Fintsi says.

The actor enacts some of the intriguing facts the two filmmakers have discovered in his lecture-monologue – he is the “professor” with the audience at the Odeon cinema playing the “students”.

English Milena Daynova