I went with a friend and saw an amazing Bulgarian film last night at the Mall of Sofia.  I was a little worried about sitting through a movie that was nearly 2 hours long in Bulgarian but it was well worth it.  We saw this film which in English is called "The World is Big and Salvation Lurks Around the Corner" or in Bulgarian is "Светът е голям и спасение дебне отвсякъде" (Svetat e golyam i spasenie debne otvsyakde).

As I am sure most of you know, I am not a film critic but this said, I'll try to give a basic summary of the movie and then I'll talk about what was the most interesting to me. Now is probably also a good time for me to make clear that this movie is in Bulgarian. I was lucky to have a friend who was wiling to whisper to me much of the dialogue in English (and even luckier that no one else was sitting too close to us).  Some of the movie was in German which I did understand and in this case the German was subtitled in Bulgarian.

So what does this mean? Well, I have a better impression of the emotions of the movie than the specifics.  Yes I was able to understand some of the Bulgarian but before seeing the movie I wondered how much I would be able to follow and if I would be able to connect to the movie.  It turns out that I was able to connect and what really surprised me was that I cried during the movie.

The movie begins with a serious car crash and then proceeds to move back and forth between a hospital in modern day Germany, 1980's communist Bulgaria and current day Bulgaria.

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The first major event in the movie takes place in in the middle 1970's in a small town in Bulgaria with the birth of a boy--Alex.  His grandfather plays backgammon and is vying for the master title in his town the same day the boy is born.  As the child grows up, his grandfather teaches him how to play backgammon and even builds a board for him. The game becomes a central motif throughout the movie--playing with ideas of chance, luck and honor.

However, life is not so idyllic for his parents in Bulgaria.  Alex's father works at a factory and is told that he must make record of all of the anti-communist things that his father-in-law says or his job is at stake.  The result is that the family decides to attempt an escape to the west. They pretend to go on holiday and flee over the Yugoslav-Italian boarder.

They are successful only to find themselves in an dismal Italian refugee camp. Things are bleak--many of the refugees have been there for more than three years waiting to be resettled and on top of this, they are given the same thing to eat every day--bowl after bowl of spaghetti.  It is clear that life in the West is not what the family expected it to be.  Backgammon ultimately provides a way out of the camp and the family emigrates to Germany.

The movie however shifts between this past and the present where Alex is in a hospital in Germany with amnesia after surviving a serious car crash that killed his father and mother.  When his grandfather arrives, he doesn't know him.  His grandfather begins the difficult and perhaps impossible work of helping his grandson regain his memory.

The work is slow going and raises a number of questions about identity, memory and the creation of self.  Who are we without family? Can we recreate family and memory? And how do we know who we are without these ties?

The story culminates in a tandem-bicycle ride across central Europe with grandfather and grandson--unlikely? Yes but it's much less about the bicycle riding and much more about the intersection of family, politics and memory.  The journey is about impossibility and possibility. The journey is an act of love--the one way that the grandfather can help Alex to recover and to reconnect to live.

When Alex arrives in Bulgaria he rides by a billboard that says welcome to the New Bulgaria.  However the face that greets the reader on the billboard is one of a politician who we recognize as one of communist party leaders who instigated this journey to Germany so many years before.  Is this really the new Bulgaria? The names of the parties have changed but the faces remain the same--only now they are smiling.

Leaving one to wonder have things changed at all? Politics it seems happens out there--other people do it--and for the individual what remains central is family and a connection to a place.  Notably this isn't however a movie about return.  The return is bittersweet. Rather this seems to be a movie about Bulgarian identity and the complexities of this identity in a post-communist world.

I thought that the film was great and this morning I started looking up movie reviews.  What I found in English was basic and included flowery but basic summaries of the movie and the reviews were good but didn't seem to get at the heart of the movie.  I found this disappointing. What was especially disappointing to me was to read that it was unlikely that the film would be released outside of the Balkans.

It's too bad really because this is the kind of story that would help more Americans understand what is happening here in Bulgaria now and the way that the communist past has influenced the people, the politics and the economy of Bulgaria.  I also think that the film begins to help explain the deep cynicism that saturates much of daily life here--cynicism which I sense in my students, my fellow teachers and Bulgarian friends.

I think that for many of you reading my post who will not have a chance to see the film you may now have the sense that this whole thing is a mess and that there's no way out.  But at the end, I was struck by the sense of hopefulness that comes from merely connecting to other people.