Dermantsi, Bulgaria

A number of us were privileged to be able to visit the Neofit Rilski school in Dermantsi last week, where Daniel Simeonov has been teaching film and photography for many years – at least 6 or 7. He has a class that has been following film since 3rd or 4th Grade (I think 9 or 10 years old) who are now in 7th Grade – 12 and 13 years old.

The filmmaker attached is Maria Dacheva, who has also been working with the group for a few years. The partnership is overseen by Arte Urbana Collectif, under the warm and watchful eye of Ralitsa Assenova. In addtion to CCAJ, the school follows CinEd – a broader viewing curriculum of European cinema.

Danile has set up his classroom as a mini cinema space: visual work on the walls, nice seats, big projector, screen, and sound – and a small library of film books. In one of the displays, the children play the game of ‘exquisite corpse’: starting with an image from an extant film (they used a shot from Jacques Rozier’s Rentree des Classes – or ‘Return to School) each child makes an image that follows the previous one, in a narrative daisy-chain. No-one sees more than the single preceding image. (See photos below).

And then they showed us some of their films..Below is a montage of four Exercises: first, a long Lumiere Minute – a two minute piece watching a couple of workmen spreading concrete; then another 2-3 minute piece observing a group of women working in a textile workshop in the village (no subtitles I’m afraid); the best piece I think is a three minute condensation of the 50 minute bus journey to school, summarised from an hour’s worth of footage (and how did they film inside and outside the bus?); and finally, a tattoo parlour film. Daniel the teacher said he had no idea there was a tattoo parlour in the village.. The bus sequence is very reminiscent of the opening to Etre et Avoir – which the children haven’t seen yet!

For the seamstress film, the children spent time getting to know the women – some they know already, but the focus woman (with the magenta hair) is from another village. Maria also talked to me about whether it’s easier or harder to film people you know: ‘For example, it might be your grandmother, but in your film she has to be ‘a grandmother”.

Without subtitles, it’s hard to know what Magenta Lady is talking about: it turns out she was a handball player until she was 40, but then had to turn her hand to something else. She says ‘Soon the snow will come and everything will become magical’. At one point, turning over the sheet she is sewing, she says something like ‘you have to love what you make otherwise it’s unbearable’. The children made the decision to stick with the filming as the women went outside for coffee; they film this beautiful ‘pause’, while the women smoke pensively, broken by one of their phones going off. It’s an incredibly mature piece of filming: one of the German filmmakers at the meeting said ‘I forgot I was watching films made by children’. They’re not Exercises; they’re like extracts from feature length documentaries.

Дерманци_Практически упражнения Киното, сто години младост 2023_24 from Arte Urbana Collectif on Vimeo.