‘We replaced one religion with another,” said Stephan Komandarev, the director of Blaga’s Lessons, a movie that is being shown at the 39th Haifa International Film Festival, which runs until October 7.
The first religion he was referring to was Soviet-era Communism and the second was capitalism. Blaga’s Lessons tells the story of a proud, intelligent woman in Bulgaria who becomes collateral damage of the “market economy,” a phrase used often in the film.
The movie, which won the prize for Best Film at the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival this year and Best Actress there for its star, Eli Skorcheva, is being screened in the “A Personal Look” section curated by the former director of the Haifa festival, Pnina Blayer. Tickets to the early screenings sold out and more were added, see haifaff.co.il/eng for details.
This is Komandarev’s third film in a trilogy about social injustice in the wake of the fall of Communism, the first two of which were Directions (2017) and Rounds (2019). He is perhaps best known internationally for his 2008 film, The World is Big and Salvation Lurks Around the Corner, which was about the life-affirming journey of a grandfather and his grandson.
Blaga’s Lessons is a far darker film that tells the story of a recently widowed language and literature teacher who is cheated out of her life savings by a phone scammer. Blaga had been eking out a living on her pension and money from private lessons, and all she wanted to do was to buy a nice grave and headstone for her late husband, a police officer. Not only does no official care about what has happened to her but she is publicly humiliated for falling victim to this scam.
Blaga, who lives alone in the city of Shumen – home to the large and impressive (or forbidding, depending on your point of view) monument to 1,300 years of Bulgarian history – is rarely in contact with her son, who is in America trying to earn a living. Angry and powerless, she takes desperate measures to try to get back some of what she has lost.
Blaga’s story is a microcosm of Bulgaria’s social ills
“The market economy is very good for the economics of a country. But when the principles of the market economy are entering into the fields of education, culture, and medical care, the results are always a disaster... I remember when the religion was about ‘the right Communism,’ that everyone will be super happy, etc., and then the new religion was about the ‘invisible hand of the market economy,’ and this hand will fix everything. And we see the results, 34 years later,” Komandarev said.
These results include the fact that Bulgaria has lost a third of its population who have left to seek their fortunes elsewhere. The elderly, who tend to stay behind, are the lion’s share of the victims of telephone scammers, who know well that most senior citizens keep a little cash tucked away to pay for their funerals “so as not to burden their children,” he said.
He and his co-scriptwriter, Simeon Ventsislavov, interviewed telephone scammers to learn the tricks of their despicable trade. One scammer said he had cheated an elderly woman out of 300,000 euros. After having shown Blaga’s Lessons around the world, Komandarev discovered that “It’s a universal phenomenon, sadly.”
Blaga’s tragedy is conveyed in a deeply felt performance by Eli Skorcheva, who was one of Bulgaria’s leading actresses in the ’80s. “Every teenager, including me, was in love with her,” Komandarev said. Skorcheva left the profession following the fall of Communism, when much of the funding for films dried up, and had a second career in the finance and insurance industries, “but now she is coming back to work in cinema... It was amazing to work with her.” He said that they had agreed on a rule that, “For Blaga, less is more. With her, the force is in the eyes.”
Komandarev, who is now at work on a new project called Made in the EU, which is similarly focused on social criticism, spoke about what he had learned by observing Bulgaria’s rocky transition from Communism to capitalism.
“I remember when I was on the streets in the ’90s, fighting for change and democracy, and if I’m honest, the reality that we have today, it’s not what we dreamed of,” he noted. Adding a touch of gallows humor, he said, “There is a very good saying that I like, and it’s that everything they told us about Communism during Communism was fake, but everything that they told us about capitalism was real.”