Wild Strawberries: Review by Edin Čusto

Ghost in the Tapestry

An American-Bulgarian woman visits her ancestral homeland for the first time

 By Edin Čusto

Documentary filmmaker Tatyana Pandurska makes her narrative debut with a story about Daphne (Vanina Kondova), an American with Bulgarian roots visiting her fatherland after inheriting a homestead from a deceased grandmother she never met. Her cousin Orlin (Ivan Yurukov) devises a con to buy it off her hands, exploiting Daphne’s obliviousness to the property’s real value. As she quickly catches onto his plan, the drama shapeshifts into a sermon about the importance of cultural health–a topic of salience in post-colonial societies reaches the Balkans.

Loosely based on Ekaterina Tomova’s 1981 collection of short stories Forgotten by the Heavens, documenting the lives of centenarians from the Rhodope Mountains region, Pandurska fictionalizes the source material with the help of screenwriter Decho Taralezhkov. The outcome examines one family’s emigration-fueled fragmentation, a phenomenon far from unique in a region shaped by the upheavals of the 19th and 20th centuries.

In applying such themes to the intricacies of contemporary Bulgarian society, Tomova gets caught halfway between an authentic characterization of the homegrown characters and a phony representation of their diaspora experience. Orlin, for instance, simmers with contempt as he drives to the airport to pick his cousin up, which reduces a man of ambition, in an environment that punishes it, to a chauffeur. The same realism is not extended to Kondova’s character, whose Americanness is barely beyond a caricature and whose slight Bulgarian accent yields a certain dissonance.

The custom of imbuing the ghosts of loved ones into loom-woven tapestries – like genies into bottles – subtly hints at the dynamic between the homegrown and the diaspora. Whether this subtlety can overpower the asymmetry in authenticity between these two groups is another question entirely.

Director: Tatyana Pandurska
Writers: Decho Taralezhkov, Tatyana Pandurska
Cast: Vanina Kondova, Ivan Yurukov, Stella Gancheva, Neno Koynarsky, Nikola Pashov, Nikola Dodov, Kiril Kavadarkov, Anna Bankina, Vasil Binev, Nikola Stefanov, Vasil Chitanov, Nikol Milevska, Anna Petrova, Yoanna Kapitanova
Certificate: n/a
Running Time: 102 minutes|
Country: Bulgaria
Year: 2025

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