Rhodope International Film Festival

The Rhodope International Film Festival took place for the fourth time from July 11-14.

The documentary film festival in the town of 25,000 inhabitants near the Bulgarian-Greek border was founded by the producer, filmmaker and long-time director of the Bulgarian Cultural Center in Berlin, Hristo Bakalski.

The FFC was involved this year. Program director Bernd Buder, together with the German-French filmmaker Nathalie David and the German-Bulgarian editor Vesela Marchevska, was part of the jury for the feature film competition, which, together with the competition for short and medium-length documentaries, formed the heart of the festival.

A total of 36 international productions were screened, many of which revolved around the theme of music, from Joan Baez to the fascinating stars of the jazz and big band scene in Mali in the early 1960s. The program was complemented by virtual reality works.

The main prize in the feature film competition went to the Austrian-Argentinean THE KLEZMER PROJECT, in which a wedding filmmaker goes in search of his Yiddish roots and the vanished klezmer and shtetl culture in Eastern Europe - a multi-layered journey to Romania and Ukraine, but also an unusual and at times self-deprecating love story.