A real story has inspired directors Kristina Grozeva and Petar Valchanov to create the Urok /Lesson/ movie. Their debut feature film has won the hearts of the audience at a series of festivals. The opening night of Urok was in Toronto. The movie was selected by a distribution company there and purchased for Canada and the USA. The movie received the Grand Award for a feature debut at another prestigious festival - the San Sebastian Film Festival in Spain, end-September.

“One can say that the story is universal as what happens to the main female character can happen to anyone,” says for Radio Bulgaria Petar Valchanov

“A few years ago Kristina and I came upon a newspaper title, reading Teacher Robs Bank”, Petar Valchanov further explains. “We saw the whole dramaturgy of the film in this sentence. That inspired us and provoked our imagination – we wrote the script and shot the movie. That absurd, the edge that the society had reached, raised many questions. The script and the movie came while we were looking for those answers.”

According to Petar Valchanov the case with the woman who robbed a bank was not even an alarm, but a clamant signal on what we had reached.

“People all over the world feel this movie as something familiar, as the financial crisis is everywhere right now. However, it is grounded on the spiritual crisis that we live in. Of course, in Bulgaria it has been a permanent thing. On the other hand it is the story of a lady that fights for her principles to the end, but at one point she falls pray to them, which makes the movie very humane in its nature.”

After San Sebastian the film has received awards at the festivals in Tokyo, Thessaloniki, Warsaw and others. Furthermore: the distinctions of the Critics‘Guild and the accredited journalists at the Golden Rose festival in Varna. Another prestigious prize has recently come from Göteborg, named after Ingmar Bergman.

Thus Urok is ranked now among the most successful Bulgarian titles over the past two decades. In fact it is the first movie of three, where each story is inspired by a newspaper title. All three plots are contemporary and come from our reality. What will be the further destiny of Urok?

“This is the interesting part – it has been purchased at quite many places,” Petar Valchanov points out. “How can I put it, the sad thing is that distributors from neighboring Balkan states have already contacted us for the movie’s distribution. It is pity that no Bulgarian distributor has called yet…”

The creators of Urok are thankful for the support of Sofia Film Fest, as well as to the Sofia Meetings program – a market for co-productions that shows new projects of young European cinema artists, along with the latest films from the Balkan region to representatives of European festivals, trade agents and distributors. “We are really happy that the Bulgarian premiere of the movie will be within Sofia Film Fest and the Sofia audience will be able to see it. We hope it will receive it the way foreign audiences did…” the director wishes to himself.

English version: Zhivko Stanchev