The international competition of the Kolkata International Film Festival is particularly convincing as a showcase of the “global South”, in which the FIPRESCI winner from Bulgaria can also be categorised.
In view of India’s Hindu-nationalist policies in recent years, which have increasingly marginalised foreign journalists Inside Modi’s crackdown on the foreign press in India | Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism (ox.ac.uk) or, like the author of these lines as a member of the FIPRESCI jury in Kolkata, not even allowing numerous directors to enter the country Visa Issues Hinder Foreign Directors at Kolkata International Film Festival | Kolkata News – Times of India (indiatimes.com), one can either shake one’s head in disgust or make the best of it, i.e. experience the films of a great, diverse festival, which Kolkata has always been, at least “live” via streams and Zoom meetings.
Not only great films portraying the “global South” such as Beloved Tropic (Querido trópico) from Panama, Teach Me (Mage Panthiye Lamayek) from Sri Lanka, Dead Man’s Switch (Arillo de hombre muerto) from Mexico, Yukiko a.k.a from Japan or The Witness (Shahed) from Iran, but also films that may fail as films with their radical impetus, but like the disturbing Indian Devastated (Vidhavastha) with its merciless and surprising search for clues into the radical Hindu soul of our present day, will continue to have an impact for a long time to come.
However, this also applies to the FIPRESCI winner of the international competition, the Bulgarian film Tarika (Stadoto) by Milko Lazarov. Lazarov, who has already won numerous awards with his debut film Alienation (Otchuzhdenie) (2014) and Ága (2018), focuses in his new film on what Bulgarian cinema has been appreciated for in recent years, especially at Western festivals. On stories such as Stephan Komandarev’s Blaga’s Lessons (Urotsite na Blaga) (2023), which tell of a society out of joint and tell of deficits in a mercilessly socially realistic way, which can easily be transferred to the miseries in other cultural areas.
This also applies to Lazarov’s Tarika, which, unlike some young Bulgarian directors such as Yana Lekarska in her Because I Love Bad Weather, does not tell its story with humour, but with a deeply poetic seriousness, which in the case of Tarika is a rural story. But even the rural country outlined here is far from remote. Although there is no electricity, a fence is busily being erected at the EU’s external border to keep out potential migrants.
However, the real danger in Tarika does not come from outside, but from within, namely from Lazarov’s heroine Tarika, a teenage girl who lives in isolation with her father and grandmother and goes about the normal activities of peasant life. Lazarov photographs this everyday life with magnificently composed images that are reminiscent of the strict film aesthetic of Andrei Tarkovsky, but are charged in a completely different way by the story, which is as tender as it is cruel. Tarika not only deals with universal themes such as migration, but above all with marginalisation and the eternal problem of the “scapegoat” in times of crisis, which is given an impressive character in the form of the young Tarika.
The narrative, carried by an impressive ensemble, nevertheless makes it clear that the story told here on a small scale also applies to the big picture, that the same procedure that is applied to Tarika here will naturally be applied to the still fictitious migrants from the global South. Lazarov’s film is particularly impressive in its depiction of the slow deformation of the truth, a deformation that is fed by pure superstition and becomes convincing “fake news” through a sinister group dynamic and is demonstratively interwoven by Lazarov with elements of magical realism. The slowness of the narrative, the sometimes slow-motion-like lingering of the camera on faces and everyday objects, creates an imperceptible vortex from which there is no escape.
Above all, Milko Lazarov manages the unusual balancing act of amalgamating and condensing poetic moments with political observations and thus finding a universal film language that makes this film understandable beyond the rural Bulgaria shown.
Axel Timo Purr
©FIPRESCI