About the Film
The Father is a powerful return for Kristina Grozeva and Petar Valchanov, crowned with the Golden Crystal—the grand prize at the Karlovy Vary Film Festival—for a comedy about parenthood and communication, full of awkward moments.
Pavel, a commercial photographer who arrives in his village to attend his mother's burial, tells little lies that he thinks would go unnoticed by the end of the day. He does not tell his pregnant wife about the reason behind his trip, neither does he tell his father, an eccentric painter, about the reason behind his wife's absence from the funeral.
However, things do not go as expected, as he finds himself caught in a dilemma with a father determined that his late wife wants to communicate with him from beyond the grave. Communication seems to be the secret—the cause of the problem, and its solution. And while logic suggests that a photographer and his painter father should be close, events reveal that the mother played an important role in diffusing an explosive situation between the two men, leaving them unable to properly bond. Various forms of communication ranging from phone calls to photographs, voice notes, text messages— and even messages from the afterlife—seem to take center stage in the film.
The political and administrative corruption that had been the main subject of the previous films by Grozeva and Valchanov takes a back seat in this production, and may be only slightly observed between the lines. Amid mutual expectations and frustration, the camera of Krum Rodriguez highlights some of the most critical relationship struggles in a man’s life, as it locks the protagonist, Pavel, inside himself, besieging him even when he is with others. This man is unable to communicate honestly and comfortably with the closest people to him: his wife and his father.
Pavel's journey between hospitals, police stations, and communist museums that turned into spiritual clinics, is essentially a journey within himself. It seems as though his mother’s death was the only way for him to finally go on this quest.
Ahmed Shawky
