Once upon a time there was a fearless pirate who robbed Turkish galleys, captured a lot of gold, and buried his treasure near the mouth of a river on the coast of the Black Sea. Two centuries later, Captain Jack has settled on this beach with a handful of criminals and alcoholics, far removed from civilisation, and built his own little realm there. Two construction trailers, a rowing boat, fresh fish, schnapps, and dynamite – that’s all the modern pirates need on their quest for the legendary treasure.
But this outlaw’s paradise is threatened – the Bulgarian Prime Minister’s brother wants to build five tourist resorts and a yacht harbour in the middle of the nature reserve. This makes the group of outlaws so restless they challenge their captain’s authoritarian regime. Mutiny looms...
Svetoslav Stoyanov tells a quirky documentarian fairy tale in which the boundaries between reality and fiction are blurred. His hero is trying to defy the modern age, where corruption and global capitalism have replaced the old order. Captain Jack takes rough but hearty care of his men as long as they don’t question the search for the legendary treasure. Can their dreams and their friendship survive the new era?

Claas Danielsen

In his opulent, playful and sometimes serene debut film Youlian Tabakov tells the chequered life story of a Bulgarian woman who survived three political regimes: monarchy, socialism and the present day. The director profits from having studied costume and design, which inspired him to interweave the documentary material with animated and staged sequences to produce a stream of imaginative and surprising images.
His grandmother, Tzvetanka Gosheva, was born in 1926 to a rich merchant’s family, which enabled her to attend a privileged school in Sofia. But this bourgeois background became her downfall after the war. Her parents were imprisoned as enemies of the party; her father would never recover from this. By sheer luck she managed to get permission to go to university. She became a doctor, though she suffered a lot of humiliation and obstruction in her work. Nonetheless she remained in the country even though she would have had opportunities to go abroad. Illness changes people, she says. Ironically, her last working day was 10 November 1989; the day Todor Zhivkov was overthrown. What follows is called democracy. Tzvetanka’s eye for politics remains sharp even though she is slowly going blind. To her the new system is corrupt. She originally wanted to become an actress: in this film the diminutive woman delivers a great performance.
– Cornelia Klauß