Acclaimed Bulgarian director duo Kristina Grozeva and Petar Valchanov return to the Karlovy Vary Film Festival competition with “Black Money for White Nights.” They won the Crystal Globe in 2019 with ‘The Father’, which represented Bulgaria in the race for the Oscar for Foreign Language Film.

An indictment of the corruption and moral decay of modern Bulgaria set in 2022, “Black Money for White Nights” centers on Marina, a nurse, and Gosha, a railway agent, a couple in their 60s who have spent years collecting small bribes to have enough money for a vacation in Russia to experience the legendary White Nights of summer: Marina’s dream. But their plans begin to fail when the travel agency they used disappears with their money and Russia invades Ukraine. There is no trip and they realize that no authority (the police, the government or even an underworld intermediary) can help. It’s all lies.

The filmmakers wanted to examine people whose emotional loyalty to Russia is so strong that their moral compass becomes distorted, “even when reality changed dramatically in 2022, these people continued to protect the story they chose to believe after the propaganda, and that was the starting point. We were interested in what happens inside these people,” Grozeva says.

He adds that “we did not want to turn our characters into political clichés or stereotypes. We wanted to build a real human being: contradictory, vulnerable, capable of tenderness and love, and at the same time capable of lying, deceiving, manipulating, etc.”

And while there is concern that a certain segment of the population will “romanticize” the Soviet-era past, “we are happy to now be part of Europe, and so we believe that the nightmarish times of the past, during the communist period, with censorship and everything else, will not be repeated again,” Valchanov says.

The film takes on an almost documentary feel that gives it a palpable sense of urgency. Valchanov points out that they shot in real places, in real locations, for much of the film, using documentary techniques and elements. “We try to combine scenes with general shots, for example, with scenes with a very dynamic editing rhythm, following the emotions of the characters,” he says.

“We worked with the great cinematographer Alexander Stanishev, who was very focused on this,” she says, and Grozeva notes that his style for this film exploited a sense of urgency and tension.

All social intuitions fall under the glare of his lens: the health system, public transportation, the police, the government, the church, and even the family.

“Well, I think it’s our reality. Nothing occurred to us. All things are true. They happened to us or they happened to some of our friends or neighbors, but yes, unfortunately, this is our reality,” Grozeva says.

The characters are products of their environment and it was crucial for the filmmakers to show that corruption also destroys personal relationships. But Marina has an epiphany and turns a new leaf, rejecting bribes and opposing the system: this adds a ray of hope to the film.

“We tried to make a space for them to start again, and that’s why we tried to build a kind of, how to say it, a tragic and happy ending,” Grozeva says.

As the credits roll, we hear Marina and Gosha continue with the last scene of the film. “We wanted after the end credits the film to continue in the audience’s mind, that’s why we tried to break the frame during the end credits. They continue acting, and this is perhaps the most powerful thing, if it is a change, if we can make people continue the film…” says Grozeva, while Valchanov finishes his thought: “projecting the film in their minds.”

They want the audience to reflect on the couple’s future, “maybe some people give them a chance to change, maybe others don’t,” he says, adding that it’s a way to get the audience to start a discussion about the film and its ideas.

“Black Money for White Nights” is a production of Abraxas Film in co-production with Graal Films, Bulgarian National Television, Hellenic Broadcasting Corp., ERT and the Greek Film Center, with the support of the Bulgarian National Film Center and Eurimages.

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