It’s September, holidays are over, half the country has returned to Sofia, and Camera EOOD, a Bulgarian Film production company is making sure that the good times do not end. Since September 2nd it has hosted free of charge outdoor cinema events: nightly projections of contemporary Bulgarian movies in the open, at the pond area in front of the monument at NDK (National Palace of Culture) in Sofia.The initiative itself is called the Kinoklub na Otkrito (Киноклуб на открито), meaning “cinema club in the open”- and that’s just what it is. At a news conference held on September 1st at Sofia city hall, organizer Alexander Donev of Camera and deputy Sofia mayor Yordanka Fandukova presented the project, which is supported by Sofia municipality’s Culture programme.
Donev said that the films included in the programme were meant to stir up discussion.
“Collective film viewing provides a different experience, and after, discussions take place naturally. This is something that does not happen in front of a computer screen or a TV,” Donev said. The programme could go so far as to incite disputes, he said, noting that there would be nothing negative about such incidents taking place.
Donev also expressed hopes that this avenue of film viewing would create discussions about the films themselves, and not so much the politics surrounding the making of Bulgarian films, which tends to spawn the majority of words in current society instead.
The other objective of Kinoklub na Otkrito is to create a screen to popularize Bulgarian cinema, Donev said. “It’s a hard battle to find screen time in cinemas, and the less and less cinemas there are, the harder it is to find projections of Bulgarian films,” he said.
