NINA ROZA World Cinema

Screening to be followed by a conversation with director and screenwriter Geneviève Dulude-De Celles.

Set between Canada and Bulgaria, Quebecois writer-director Geneviève Dulude-de Celles’ (THE CUT, AFI FEST 2014) sophomore narrative feature is a poetic contemplation on fatherhood, heritage and art through the lens of post-Soviet diaspora. Having emigrated to Montreal in the ‘90s with his then eight-year-old daughter Roza, single parent and contemporary art curator Mihail (played by a solemn and melancholic Galin Stoev) is commissioned by a collector to confirm the authenticity of a Bulgarian art prodigy, Nina (jointly embodied by the ingenious twin casting of Sofia and Ekatarina Stanina). Returning to his native Bulgaria for the first time in three decades, the skeptical curator is slowly captivated by the inscrutable yet clever eight-year-old Nina, who seems inseparable from the rugged, rural land that raised her. Captured in all of its glimmering, golden-hour beauty under cinematographer Alexandre Nour Desjardins’ anamorphic lens, Mihail navigates this once familiar but now alien Bulgarian countryside, whose villagers regard his accented Bulgarian and foreign affect with equal caution and warm embrace, as phantoms of his exiled past and present converge. Drawing on her background in documentary filmmaking and close collaboration with Bulgarian producers Nikolay Mutavchisky and Lubomira Piperova on the script, Dulude-de Celles crafts a cross-generational immigrant story marked by its delicate dance between dualities. Through narrative parallels between the eponymous Nina and Roza, and mirroring reflections between Mihail’s decision to displace his family and his curatorial ethics of discovery in the face of global commodification, this Berlinale Silver Bear winner for Best Screenplay confirms Dulude-de Celles as a flourishing talent to watch. –Anna Li