Godless
Bezbog
Ralitza Petrova
In a remote Bulgarian town, Gana looks after the elderly with dementia, while trafficking their ID cards on the black market of identity theft. At home, she provides for her jobless mother, with whom she hardly speaks. Her relationship with her car-mechanic boyfriend is no shelter for love either - with sexual attraction gone, intimacy is reduced to an addiction to morphine. Nothing seems to have consequences on Gana's conscience, not even the accidental murder of a patient who was threatening to expose her fraudulent dealings. Things start to shake up, when Gana hears the music of Yoan, a new patient, whose ID card she has trafficked. A growing empathy for the old man unlocks Gana's drugged-up conscience, and she is ready for change. But when Yoan is arrested for fraud, she learns that doing 'the right thing' comes at a high price.
With : Irena Ivanova, Ivan Nalbantov, Ventzislav Konstantinov, Alexandr Triffonov, Dimitar Petkov
Screenplay : Ralitza Petrova
Image : Krum Rodriguez, Chayse Irvin
Sound : Momchil Bozhkov, Peter Albrechtsen
Editing : Donka Ivanova, Ralitza Petrova
Screenplay : Ralitza Petrova
Image : Krum Rodriguez, Chayse Irvin
Sound : Momchil Bozhkov, Peter Albrechtsen
Editing : Donka Ivanova, Ralitza Petrova
Production : KLAS Film, Snowglobe, Alcatraz Films, Film Factory
International sales: Heretic Outreach
International sales: Heretic Outreach
Born in Bulgaria, Ralitza Petrova lives and works between England, Bulgaria, and France. In her early life, she studied Fine Art, and later Fiction Directing at the UK's National Film and Television School. Her films have won acclaim at film festivals such as Cannes, Berlin, and Toronto, as well as on numerous art platforms, including the Centre Pompidou, Paris. Her film By the Grace of God premiered at the Cannes Film Festival. Her debut, Godless, has been won production prizes at TorinoFilmLab's FrameWork 2013, Sarajevo Film Festival's CineLink 2015, and the Women in Film Finishing Fund, Los Angeles.
“I guess the idea for Godless was to tackle a reality that is so painful, humiliating and aggressive that the question becomes: how do you preserve your dignity, and how do you preserve a kind of personal center as a human being? How do you preserve your soul, basically. The whole film is a complete kind of tone and style, but if you want to tackle the subject from the pain, from the most crass feelings of the characters and their experience, I think you have to take a kind of atmosphere and tone, which is more austere and harsh. To do that, in order to portray these people, you have to bring them up a bit like statues – a bit like in an Ozu film, or in the work of Kaneto Shindo – to raise them up in this more heroic sort of way; as heroes in a way. This was clear in terms of the atmosphere of the film.” Ralitza Petrova
“I guess the idea for Godless was to tackle a reality that is so painful, humiliating and aggressive that the question becomes: how do you preserve your dignity, and how do you preserve a kind of personal center as a human being? How do you preserve your soul, basically. The whole film is a complete kind of tone and style, but if you want to tackle the subject from the pain, from the most crass feelings of the characters and their experience, I think you have to take a kind of atmosphere and tone, which is more austere and harsh. To do that, in order to portray these people, you have to bring them up a bit like statues – a bit like in an Ozu film, or in the work of Kaneto Shindo – to raise them up in this more heroic sort of way; as heroes in a way. This was clear in terms of the atmosphere of the film.” Ralitza Petrova