Bulgarian film-director Kamen Kalev wins the CEI Award at the Trieste Film Festival

The CEI Award addressed to the film that best interprets the contemporary reality and dialogue between cultures has been assigned to the Bulgarian director Kamen Kalev for the feature film “Eastern Plays”. The international jury has selected this film “for the capability to tell a story with efficiency and proportion, a story that is emblematic of the problems linked with globalisation and at the same time stresses the profound humanity of the leading characters”.
 
The editor and producer of the film, Stefan Piryov, was in Trieste and provided a personal testimony, as the film’s protagonist was a friend of his and of Kamen Kaley: the movie’s aim was to help this friend to overcome drug-addiction and, for a while, it seemed that he was about to make it. Unfortunately, soon after the film shootings, he died, and therefore this film is dedicated to him. “This film was meant to be a message of hope and continues to be so, but to hide the truth from the viewers would have been a lie” Piryov says. In the movie, this friend has a younger brother who reacts differently to life anxieties: he does not take drugs, but he is a militant in a neo-nazi group. This is just another type of dependence, which transforms people’s nature, distorting it.
 
The Awarding ceremony was attended by one of the most important French and international actresses, Fanny Ardant, on the occasion of her debut as a filmmaker, directing and writing the film that closed the 21st Trieste Film Festival, the French-Rumanian co-production “Ashes and Blood”: the story of a woman that raises her three children alone after her husband being murdered, and who goes back to her native country, Romania, after 18 years to attend a wedding.