Facing the Sun tells the story of a pure, joyful and positive young woman Neda, who lives on the edge of the world. She is hesitating about her future because the prospects in the remote countryside are not exciting. Instead of her leaving the place, unexpectedly the big world comes to her when she meets Mila, a girl from the capital, who accidentally ends up in the small town. The encounter between the two girls is filled with curiosity, but also with clashes and conflicts.
The cast includes Paolina Dimitrova, Miglena Vezirova, Boris Varbanov and Plamen Dimov.
“I'm getting more and more interested in inventing my characters. I know that nowadays serious cinema relies on the opposite: authors rather seek and discover the characters of their films in real life. Let's say that I try to walk along some edge between the two possibilities, with a slight advantage of ‘inventing’. I am also interested in the collision of the centre and the periphery, of the modern and the archaic, trying not to judge, and yet I’m still choosing the idealised and perhaps even infantile worldview of Neda”, Lyubomir Mladenov told FNE.
The film was shot for 30 days in the summer of 2023 in the region of Lyubimets, a small town near the Turkish border, lensed by Kiril Prodanov.
“The film is shot in a classic style with a static camera with minimum frames, and where this was possible, the scenes were shot entirely in plan-episode. My aspiration was for the camera not to be felt, to simply be a witness to what is happening”, Lyubomir Mladenov also said.
Pavlina Angelova and Nikolay Todorov of Screening Emotions are the producers of the film and the coproducers are Magic Shop, Maxim 15, Sonus Studio and Right solutions, all from Bulgaria.
„As producers we were captured from the very beginning by the exceptional cinematic potential of the project, and we highly value the director’s delicate manner of storytelling. The material we’ve shot is extremely promising and we are sure that this will be a very powerful film focused on the ability to see the beauty all around us and to appreciate the little things in life that brings us joy”, Pavlina Angelova told FNE.
The budget is 300,000 EUR and the production support from the Bulgarian National Film Center amounts to 215,000 EUR.
Screening Emotions is currently searching for sales agents and coproducers to join the postproduction stage, which will end in the spring of 2024.
Production Information:
Producer:
Screening Emotions (Bulgaria)
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Coproducers:
Magic Shop (Bulgaria)
Maxim 15 (Bulgaria)
Sonus Studio (Bulgaria)
Right solutions (Bulgaria)
Credits:
Director: Lyubomir Mladenov
Scriptwriter: Lyubomir Mladenov
DoP: Kiril Prodanov
Cast: Paolina Dimitrova, MiglenaVezirova, Boris Varbanov, Plamen Dimov
