Sofia International Film Festival

Ave is
one of the most highly anticipated films of the year. The work keeps
the viewers in a natural suspense that is not a filmmaking trick but the
core of the story told – universal on one hand, but on the other hand,
somehow corresponding to the local reality (just before the start of the
shooting Konstanin Bozhanov was offered to rewrite the script and
moving the story to Seattle, but he refused because it didn’t seem
natural to him). A film with very dark and poorly lit spaces and with
two very colorful main characters. A film with a lot of quotes for
lovers (music fragments by Marc Ribot and featuring Bruno S. from The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser and Stroszek of Herzog). Film, which despite its big international awards, is going to be discussed long.

Let’s start from the suburbs – Avé
starts from the outskirts of Sofia and follows its specific path
through the “edge of this unexplained world”, if we quote the Irish poet
Desmond Egan...

The idea was to start from a town, from
an urban landscape, and gradually reach a pastoral picture, such as,
for example, suggests the river. Actually it is not necessary to take a
ship to go to a non-existent village on the Danube. It was important for
me though, characters to experience not only a spiritual and
intellectual development during the story, but also physically to move
in such an unpredictable trajectory.

So we have three
plans – the special geometry of physical movement, the inner, spiritual
movement, and a third layer – the words which not always co¬incide with
the so-called objective reality, and often they are in contrast with it.

Largely Avé is a film about the clash of young
people with the world of adults, about their first encounter with death
and a different kind of love. In a confrontation with the adult world,
the two characters have different protective mechanisms: while Avé is a
pathological liar and dreamer, Kamen is an introvert and shies away from
the world. And therefore, both characters are isolated, and words and
the selection of expressions in the communication with adults, are
protective mechanisms that keep them such as they are.

In
other words – a kind of history of Holden Caulfield and a more
melancholic Pippi Longstocking, narrated in contemporary language.

Holden
Caulfield is definitely one of the inspirations for the creation of
Kamen. Although he has an overlap as philosophy with myself, he is very
different from me and we can discover more features of Holden Caulfield,
than mine. And about Pippi Longstocking... yes, somehow Avé with her
fictitious stories is such precisely as a result and resistance to the
family, which is actually missing in her life.

Read the whole interview on Sofia International Film Festival's website.