After all of the film festival buzz, we were ready finally to deliver the film to the mass public. As I said latter in this book. We wanted to release NoOne in the autumn of 2016. I was thinking that November or December would be the best time of the year for our film. We discussed and agreed with Christo from A+Films about it. We had to apply for a small grant from NFC which to cover some of the distribution expense. September 2016 We applied for them and we had to wait six months to receive the answer from them. This made our premiere further in time into 2017.
This is probably the most disgusting and awful period from all of the stage of making the films. To wait for the date in which the film will be in the cinemas made me feel completely powerless and suddenly after all of these years of struggle and pain, I was a prison of the cinema theaters owners, of NFC and again I was in the hands of the establishment.
This was our biggest mistake from all of the mistakes we made. This and the decision to enter to film festivals. The film was ready in March 2016, people were hooked and eager to watch it. However, we presented to them in May 2017 one year and a half after the right time. What a scam. Anyhow, Christo convinced us that it was pointless to aim for the wide release in every cinema possible, because that would mean more money spend for cinema licenses, but instead of that He convinced us that is better to focus only in art-house cinemas in Bulgaria which are basically seven cinemas. If we wanted to enter into the big cinema chains we had to pay entrance fee for every screening hall in which we would play NoOne. And the entrance fee various from 1000 euro to 500 euro, of course we couldn't afford to pay to the cinemas in order for them to play the film so we gave up that idea.
We did another media campaign, a second one following the previous year advertisement campaign for the premiere, which was another crazy thing through which we went. Misho our PR went crazy after realizing that we already had been almost in every Tv show in which he wanted to put us. He somehow managed to organize more than ten TV appearances before the official release date.
On 7th of April we finally released the film in the art-house cinemas in Bulgaria. The film opened in seven cities with 14 cinema theaters and stayed there for 4 weeks. So far the film has been watched by around 6-7000 people in cinema theaters and even now G8 Cinema and EuroCinema are screening the film.
Not bad for a micro-budget feature film without the support of any national institution and private company.
UPDATES 2020
YATAGAN was released on 20.02.2020 in more than 65 cinemas across Bulgaria.
Yatagan was screened for tow weeks before the national Lockdown. The film was seen in cinemas by more than 29 000 people. The expected number of views were more than 100 000 views.
Yatagan's distributor is A+Films which are the producers of the film. They operate more than nine cinemas, additionally to that they run mobile cinema and open cinemas in Bulgaria.
Yatagan was released immediately after it was finished, the producers didn't want to send the movie to any film festival, because they decided that the film is to commercial and being a brown comedy it wont be appreciated from the art house cinema lovers.
My overall experience with the Bulgarian cinemas is not good at all. The problems are many - the sound and picture quality for most of them is terrible.
They don't do anything to promote the independent films which they are showing, they don't care about the customer experiences and the provided value for money is not worthy.
My prediction about the Bulgarian cinemas is quite negative. I think that after ten years most of them wont exist.
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