Review by Fernando Figueroa

CINEMA APORIA

A harsh confrontation with a dysfunctional past and the traumas of a bitter childhood. Thanks to his return to his childhood home to get rid of his father’s belongings, Kaloyan experiences his uncles’ and relatives’ reluctance to embrace modernity in post-communist Bulgaria. But selling his father’s apartment means emptying it and burning his belongings. But the most painful belongings will not be those he throws into the fire, but rather the intangible ones in the collective or personal memory of neighbors and paternal friends, which progressively affect his own, and whose anecdotes turn the mission or specific objective of the trip from Spain into a real ordeal. 

Perhaps it would be easier if she didn’t have to make decisions at the government office about the niche for the remains without any information, given the bad relationship between her mother and father, or if her mother didn’t call her so obsessively as if she were five years old, or if Koko wasn’t so quiet and wasn’t tattooed up to his neck, which shows his open-mindedness or millennial mentality, so different from the old sexagenarians he interviews, talks to, and has dinner with. It would be easier if they didn’t give him such lively but contradictory anecdotes about his father doing this and that, about his father shitting near the river because of an encounter with the authorities and leaving him his driver’s license, and so on, painting him as a great man, while Kaloyan –Koko– instead had the image in his mind of a father he remembers saying, ” ‘And you don’t have anyone else to add to the team?’” when young Koko happily told him how happy he was to have been accepted by the sports professionals. Unfortunately, his treatment of the current consequences in Bulgaria due to the neoliberal project or postmodernism, such as the construction of golf courses and more profitable shopping centers, is very poor. In this regard, consider the case of Lydia, a diabetic woman who longs to be injected with excess insulin to bring about her death, but instead of listening to her, they are convinced by her to listen to her miseries.
Another example is the cemetery where the aforementioned remains are located, land sold—without the slightest respect—for modern projects that despise the past and traditional places. The sequences of conversations during dinners or meals are long and could have been edited, and the use of the 1:1 film format does not improve the insurmountable gaps caused by the exchange of cameras.