Screened as part of NZIFF 2016

Thirst 2015

Jajda

Directed by Svetla Tsotsorkova

In this richly atmospheric debut, a hot summer in the Bulgarian countryside gets hotter when a family acquires two extra inhabitants on their parched property – a well-driller and his unruly teenage daughter.

Bulgaria In Bulgarian with English subtitles
90 minutes CinemaScope / DCP

Producers

Nadejda Koseva
,
Svetla Tsotsorkova

Screenplay

Svetoslav Ovcharov
,
Svetla Tsotsorkova
,
Ventsislav Vasilev

Photography

Vesselin Hristov

Editors

Nina Altaparmakova
,
Svetla Tsotsorkova

Production designer

Georgi Todorov-Jozy

Costume designer

Elena Stoyanova

Music

Hristo Namliev

With

Monika Naydenova (the girl)
,
Alexander Benev (the boy)
,
Svetlana Yancheva (the boy’s mother)
,
Ivaylo Hristov (the boy’s father)
,
Vassil Mihajlov (the girl’s father)
,
Ivan Barnev (the driver)
,
Stefan Mavrodijev (the shopkeeper)

Festivals

San Sebastián
,
London 2015; San Francisco 2016

Elsewhere

First-time director Svetla Tsotsorkova draws us into the unique setting of her debut film and the five souls who inhabit it with spellbinding assurance.

On a dusty road somewhere in the Bulgarian countryside a teenage boy lives with his convalescent father and his mother, who takes in laundry from city hotels, hanging row upon row of bedsheets to dry in the hot breeze. It has not rained for months and water is running low. The arrival of a well-driller and his water-divining teenage daughter gradually engulfs the tiny family in a welter of mutual suspicions. The girl is magnetic and unruly, resentful of her father’s dependency and contemptuous of the sheltered, fascinated boy. Trouble brews like a longed-for storm in the stifling summer air.

“Suffused with golden light, the film’s atmospheric widescreen photography contributes to the dreamy sense of otherness that pervades Thirst. A gentle, lilting flute and guitar melody, sparsely employed, is the only music. But for all its style, this is very much a film about five lost people: and it’s a remarkable achievement, on the part of the director, the writers and the actors, that we care about every single one of them.” — Lee Marshall, Screendaily