Veteran Bulgarian director Ivan Pavlov, whose most recent feature, Memories of Fear, won a host of accolades, including Best Film and Best Director at the 2017 Bulgarian Film Academy Awards, has wrapped post-production on a new film, Spring Equinox. The project is a co-production between Art 47, represented by Mariyana Pavlova, Doli Media, Red Carpet and Magic Shop.

The screenplay, written by Krasimir Krumov, follows several characters in a small, provincial town who meet by chance on a bus. The main characters are Neno, the bus driver; Miro, a teenager who has a completely different perspective on life compared to his father; and Rasho, a young man who is pressured by his German girlfriend to move to Berlin.

The budget amounts to circa €500,000. The Bulgarian National Film Center supported the production with approximately €400,000. The shoot took place for 22 days at the end of 2019 in the town of Haskovo, in South-Eastern Bulgaria. Emil Christov was the DoP, while Veselka Kiryakova (who is also a co-producer through Red Carpet) was in charge of the editing. The main characters are played by Svetlana Yancheva, Ivaylo Hristov, Nencho Kostov, Diana Handzhieva, Krasimir Dokov and Ivan Savov.

Producer Pavlova tells Cineuropa that the film’s post-production took much longer than expected because of the pandemic. She also says the biggest challenge of Spring Equinox was a certain scene during which “a train, a car and a trolleybus had to pass by at night in one single shot: the train under a bridge, the car under the bridge but in another direction, and the trolleybus had to drive over the bridge in a third direction, all while the relationships between three of the characters were developing. It was important that all of this happened in one single shot because that was the director’s whole concept for the entire film: one sequence – one shot.”

As for director Pavlov, he says that he has always been interested “in the common man – the ‘invisible’ man, the non-hero with his dramas and dreams. I don't want to have theses in my films, only the truth about the life of that man.” Pavlov also says that for his story, he needed a small, provincial town. “The problems there are stripped to the bone – poverty, unemployment, the lack of trade-union protection, and a dysfunctional social system... People are literally abandoned to arbitrariness – they are perplexed, lost in the social chaos, embarrassed in their attempts to survive,” the director explains. But not everything is bad in his film. “Regardless of everything, there is always a moment when the darkness and the light are equal. The spring equinox could be a little gesture of an unspoken confession or healing forgiveness – all simple things that help us live this absurd life.”