Next change: The Judgment at Katara

The timing couldn’t have been better – of the screening and of the film’s premise itself.  Tomorrow evening, Katara and the Embassy of Bulgaria are presenting a screening of the extremely relevant The Judgment – a deeply affecting film centered on a father and a son living in a poor area, near the Bulgarian-Turkish-Greek border.
Interestingly, director Stephan Komandarev’s compelling drama took off around the close of 2011, a time when Europe had just begun seeing the first Syrian refugees rooted out by the civil war in their home country. Four years later, last September, when Bulgaria chose the film as its entry in the foreign-language film category of Oscars, the migration crisis was at its peak, filling the film with even more resonance.
Although The Judgment (Sadilishteto; original title) is set during the Cold War, the comparisons to today’s situation are inevitable. In a small, poor village in Bulgaria, located close to the border with Turkey and Greece, the story follows the lives of Mityo and his son Vasko. Having lost his wife, the respect of his 18-year-old son and the job that enabled him to pay off the loan for his mortgaged house, Mityo is a desperate man ready to take desperate measures.
So as to keep his house and pay his loans, he agrees to work for his former military commander to smuggle illegal Syrian immigrants across the border that he once had to defend. The road leads across a peak called The Judgment, a place full of dark memories from thousands of years of history, but also from Mityo’s own past.
Add to this, his relations with Vasko are strained, following the death of his wife. It’s the revelation of a terrible secret that will force Mityo to face the past, in order to regain his internal peace and find forgiveness from his son.
Komandarev’s documentaries have received several national and international awards. Bread Over the Fence, in 2002, looked at the lives of one of Bulgaria’s oppressed religious minorities, Catholics, examining how they lived alongside their Orthodox Christian and Muslim neighbours, while Alphabet of Hope, in 2003, traced the lives and schooling of children from ethnic Turkish families in Bulgaria left behind after a government policy sparked mass migration to Turkey.
His biggest success has been The World Is Big And Salvation Lurks around the Corner (2008), which became the first Bulgarian film to make it to the Foreign-language Oscar short list. The fascinating story of Alex, who, with the help of his charismatic grandfather, Bai Dan, embarks on a journey in search of his real self, received more than 30 international wards, 10 of them being Audience Awards.
In an interview with The Hollywood Reporter (THR), last year, Komandarev said, “The starting point (for The Judgment) was when I realised what an interesting place this border is. During the communist period — more than a quarter of a century ago — would-be defectors from the communist bloc were trying to escape to Greece or Turkey, crossing illegally at this border. Today, thousands of migrants from Syria also try their luck crossing the same border, but in the opposite direction — to the ‘promised land’ of the European Union.”
However, when Komandarev was shooting the film, the situation was far from as alarming as today. “None of us expected that today’s European migrant crisis would happen in such frightening proportions,” he said, in the interview to THR, pointing out that the film is not some kind of political comment on today’s migrant crisis.
Like other Balkan countries, Bulgaria has been majorly impacted by the migrant wave, with thousands entering the country illegally, most of them en route to Western Europe.
Born in 1966, Komandarev kicked off his career as a doctor and psychiatrist who got into filmmaking “because Bulgarian shrinks were required to film therapy sessions.”
Being the youngest and perhaps the most tech-friendly psychiatrist on staff, Komandarev had an advantage – he was able to get a grasp on the medium. A graduate from Medical University in Sofia and film and TV direction in New Bulgarian University, his feature debut, Dog’s House, was presented in Berlinale’s Forum.
The Judgment will be screened at the Katara Drama Theatre at 7 pm, tomorrow.