In June 2016 I received an email from prof. Alexander Grozev who invited us to participate with NoOne in the 21 st edition of Love Is Folly, which is an international film festival happening in the city of Varna.
I was very much surprised by this email, because our festival adventure so far was devastating. We received rejection after rejection and this invitation came at the right moment as a fresh air. At that time I still believed that if a movie is good and innovative, bold, interesting and with certain appeal for sure it will make an impression on somebody from the film festival programmers. I will write in detail about my experience with the film festivals in another specially dedicated chapter, however I wanted to separate this event from the general festival chapter not only because Gergana Pletnyova and Silvia Petkova were awarded with the award for leading female, but also because I had the chance to speak with some of the film festival jury.
From this conversation I got to realize that the quality and the nature of the film really matter for the film festivals juries and programmers, but it's not the leading factor whether some films would be selected or awarded to film festivals, but certainly the quality is a serious factor. However, what really matters and makes an impact to the final result,is how much the film's creators are well known or how big is their network of contacts, how many authoritative people(other filmmakers, film critics, the media) influence and back up the project, how many countries are making it and of course for how much it was produced also matters more than its quality and nature.
Another thing which I realize is that with film festivals you have to have a great amount of patience and trust in your work, because as one of the well known jury said to me, that very often his favorite films don't win any awards, and in some cases are not even selected.
I spent a very positive week in the film festival, which is quite well organized and is happening on the coast of the Black sea. The selected films in competition were very good too, and the winner and my favorite was MUSTANG.
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