Glory

Kristina Grozeva and Petar Valchanov’s follow-up to The Lesson (also a New Wave Films release) is a social parable about a humble man who gets unwillingly promoted, and ends up sacrificed.

Railway linesman Tsanko Petrov (Stefan Denolyubov) discovers millions of lev on the train tracks. When he reports the money rather than pocketing it, his co-workers label him the “fool of the nation,” but the Ministry of Transport—currently embroiled in a scandal—takes the opportunity to parade their new hero. Little do they know that Tsanko suffers from a debilitating stutter and might not be a PR person’s dream of an example of Bulgarian honesty and responsibility to parade on TV.

But compared to the intense and driven Julia Staikov (Margita Gosheva from The Lesson), he’s an angel. When Julia removes his watch—a Russian-made Slava (Glory), inscribed and presented to him by his father—for the ceremony to present him with an improved digital model, it sets off a chain of events that threatens to bring down the Ministry thanks to a combination of corruption, irresponsibility and arrogance..

Winner Best International Feature Film Edinburgh Film Festival 2017

Kristina Grozeva, born in Bulgaria in 1976, graduated in Journalism at the University of Sofia in 2000 and in Film and TV Directing at the National Academy for Theater and Film Art in 2005. She has received several award for her short films, Birds of Heaven (Best Fiction Debut, Bulgarian Film Academy Awards 2008), and Gap (Special mention, Media School International Film Festival, Lodz 2009).

In 2008, Petar Valchanov (born in 1982) also graduated in Film and TV Directing at the NATFA. Shock, his first short film, was selected in the student program at Karlovy Vary Film Festival (2001), and Resurrection won the Best Film award at the International Student Film Festival in Velingrad (2003). Petar Valchanov and Kristina Grozeva have directed the documentary Parable of Life (2009) together, followed by the award winning TV feature Forced Landing. Recently they wrote and directed the short film Jump, which received numerous prestigious awards, among them the European Film Awards 2013 at the Clermont-Ferrand International Short Film Festival and the Excellence Award for Best Picture at Busan International Short Film Festival 2013. Glory is their follow-up to The Lesson.

Filmography

Kristina Grozeva

Shorts

2008 Birds of Heaven

2009 Gap

Petar Valchanov

Shorts

2001 Shock

2003 Resurrection

Kristina Grozeva & Petar Valchanov

Shorts

2013 Jump

Documentary

2009 Parable of Life

Feature-length film

2014 The Lesson

2016 Glory

Jay Weissberg, Variety

'Another stiletto-sharp report on the state of modern Bulgaria from the directors of the equally tense and insightful The Lesson.'

Allan Hunter, Screen International

'This incisive, funny cinematic parable, shot and edited in a disarming, documentarylike style.'

Glenn Kenny, The New York Times

★★★★

‘It feels incongruous to claim that Glory is a funny, what with its focus on institutional corruption and the constant threat of violence in a society unaccustomed to the competitiveness of a market economy, but it is, with Tzanko's predicament approached with an unlikely sense of humour.’

Patrick Gamble, Cinevue

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