Bulgaria aired a new proposal for a foreign-language “Oscar” – Culture
After it became known on Wednesday (September 21) that Zornitsa Sofia’s film “Mother”, selected as a candidate for nomination for a foreign-language “Oscar”, was dropped from the competition due to non-compliance with technical requirements, the National Film Center (NFC) determined a new Bulgarian candidacy.
The decision was made at a meeting of the Commission for the selection of a Bulgarian nomination for participation in the competition for international feature film at the 95th Oscar Awards of the American Film Academy. The commission is composed of Maria Bakalova, chairwoman and members Katerina Lambrinova, Hristo Hristozov, Svilen Dimitrov, Katya Trichkova, Kristina Grozeva and Alexander Stanishev.
As in almost every previous year, the choice of “Mother” for the Bulgarian selection for the “Oscar” came after a series of scandals. The film was selected as the winner of the competition with the productions “In the heart of the machine”, “Petya on my Petya”, “Stock market players”, “Softly spoken”, “Shakespeare as a street dog”, “φ 1.618” and “Herringbone”.
However, director Viktor Bozhinov withdrew “Escape” because of a conflict of interest in a member of the commission. There was a replacement in the composition of the jury, but despite this, Bozhinov did not return his film to the competition.
“Mother” was disqualified from the race for a foreign-language Oscar nomination after it was discovered that the film did not meet the Hollywood Academy’s requirements for the ratio of English to foreign speech in a production. According to its director Zornitsa Sofia, nowhere on the website of the Academy was it explained “how exactly” English speech is measured, and after the team of “Mother” helped clarify whether subtitles or words and letters of the given language are counted, they answered “with duration”.
According to this word in the film, it was clocked at approximately a minute and a half more for “non-English words” that is Bulgarian, Swahili and Maasai adverbs. And it was passed off as an “international film” with an international and non-American crew. However, the Academy returned the nomination to him.
The new Bulgarian representative “In the heart of the machine” is a film for which Martin Makariev prepared for more than 10 years. The script, written by Borislav Zahariev, is based on a true case told by a relative of his director. After several edits, detailed consideration and image building, the story came to the attention of the NFC committee and received funding that allowed investment in the best camera equipment.
The official movie trailer
Thanks to this, “In the Heart of the Machine” has the claim to be the first Bulgarian film for cinema with 4K and HDR (High Dynamic Range) quality. The complete shooting team is designed to achieve the most realistic, high-contrast images without losing the final details. Martin Makariev is also the director of the films “Villa Roza”, “Attraction” and “Wild and Happy”.