“Sister is actually a story about myself" says director Svetla Tsotsorkova, "I was seven years old when my mother sent me out to buy some bread. On my way to the bakery, I ran into some other kids and we ended up spending the money I had on cotton candy. I came home with a bag of chestnuts that one of the neighbourhood kids had given to me. I told my parents that the baker’s wife was having a baby, which is why the bakery was closed, and that I had bought the chestnuts, so that we’d have something to eat.
I was nineteen years old when I applied to the National Academy for Theatre and Film Arts in Sofia. I wrote a short film script about drug addicts and made it to the next round. Georgi Djulgerov, who would become my professor, asked me how I knew such details about the life of drug addicts. I told him that my parents had hired a man to drop me off and pick me up from school, and that one day I’d found him taking drugs in the bath- room of our apartment. In order to avoid having to give further explanations, I quickly added that the man had subsequently died and that I’d found him dead at the threshold of that same bathroom. And then I started crying.
I was raised by my grandmother in a village in the Strandzha Mountain in the southeastern part of Bulgaria. Our life there was boring, locked as it was between the vineyard, the vegetable garden, and taking care of the donkey. And how can you not make up stories when the daily grind itself doesn’t offer anything exciting?
Sister is a love confession for the people who live precisely such seemingly unremarkable lives. It seems to me that we all owe a debt to the truth about the kind of world we live in."
Screening at The Riverfront, Aberystwyth Arts Centre and Taliesin Arts Centre during WOW Film Festival.
