Produced by PREMIERstudio and supported by the Bulgarian National Film Centre, director Dimitar Stoyanovich has completed shooting his first drama feature, Flesh.
The script, also by Stoyanovich, centres on Nadezhda (played by Plamena Getova) who, while translating Nobel Prize winner Yukio Kobayashi’s novel Flesh, discovers she has a brain tumour. Constructed around three parallel stories, the plot focuses first on Nadezhda’s relationship with her daughter, then on the novel and finally on the spread of the carcinoma.
Interviewed by Pavlina Jeleva of Film New Europe, the director explains the biographical inspiration of this story. “Flesh is a purely personal story, which I wrote in about 20 days during the summer of 2020,” he explains. The character of Nadezhda is based directly on his mother, who died of cancer. According to Stoyanovich, the film’s title Flesh, from the novel at the centre of story, evokes the idea of “flesh as the main factor of human existence.”
Filmed mostly in Sofia between October and December 2022, “the main challenge of this production”, explains producer Nikolay Mutafchiev, “was to show the slow evolution of the central character’s illness without compromise and in the most realistic way possible.”
Dimitar Stoyanovich is known as an author and editor of the magazine L’Europe. He has also written the scripts for several documentaries and feature films, including Luchezar Avramov’s A Picture With Yuki.
Sources: Film New Europe, Script East
