THE WORLD OF KOREA IN THE BULGARIAN FILMS DIRECTED BY YANA LEKARSKA

Abstract

n the recent years, several Bulgarian cinematic works have put into the space frame some kind of new artistic enactment with many different and even unrecognised identities, along with their visible stereotypes, patterns and models of representation: the well-known Bulgarian identity starts dialogising through screen with Far East (in general plan) cultures and unfamiliar Asian characters. This is definitely something absolutely new to the national cinema, i.e. to realize original themes and stories on the Bulgarian-Asian axis, to introduce totally unused, even attractive personages, often even in an absolutely non-Bulgarian cultural environment. In fact, these films are exactly in these two directions: the first variant of realisation explores the confrontation between the Bulgarian and the Asian identities in the context of our contemporary and post-totalitarian reality. The second variant of realization is the unprecedented deep immersion in the distant Asian territories with other aesthetic conventions, where the worldviews and behaviours are far from the European and Western values, and of course, in their compendium generate other, supranational and categorically universal meanings and messages. The proposed paper analyses the second cinematic trend, where the young Bulgarian female director Yana Lekarska works. The research focus is totally on her shorts, filmed in the Republic of Korea – the feature films Bridge (2016), November will be May (2017), Here and Now (2018) and the documentary Nam nam buk nyeo (2016). Yana Lekarska's entire work in terms of worldview and architectonics is much more Korean in style, than representative of the typical Bulgarian cinema.