Cvetanka

In his poetic and vivid debut film, set designer and illustrator Youlian Tabakov tells the chequered life story of a Bulgarian woman who survived three political regimes: monarchy, socialism and the present day. Documentary material is cleverly combined with animated and staged sequences to produce a stream of imaginative and surprising images. Tzvetanka Gosheva, was born in 1926 to a rich merchant's family, which enabled her to attend a privileged school in Sofia. But this bourgeois background became her downfall after the war. Her parents were imprisoned as enemies of the party; her father would never recover from this. By sheer luck she managed to get permission to go to university. She became a doctor, though she suffered a lot of humiliation and obstruction in her work. Nonetheless, she remained in the country, even though she would have had opportunities to go abroad. Ironically, her last working day was 10 November 1989 - the day the Communist regime was overthrown. What follows is called democracy. Tzvetanka's eye for politics remains sharp even though she is slowly going blind. To her the new system is corrupt. (CinEast)