BLAGA ’ S LESSONS
Review by Pat Frickey
Blaga ( a brilliant Eli Skorcheva ), a seventy-year-old retired teacher , has only one thing on her mind : burying her recently deceased husband , a police officer , with dignity ; she firmly believes she has only a forty-day window to save his soul . The graveyard manager ( Stefan Denolyubov ) gives her the hard sell ; for a respectable plot with a view she must come up with the funds quickly before it is snatched away by another grieving widow . He expounds on that Bulgaria is now a capitalist country with a market economy . His hands are tied . Luckily Blaga can scrape the money together , though her son Lyudmil ( Gerasim Georgiev ) who regularly FaceTimes with her while working night and day from a delivery truck in the US , tries to talk her out of spending her life savings on a funeral and burial plot . But Blaga is a determined woman .
© JIP FILM & VERLEIH
BLAGA ’ S LESSONS
EINE FRAGE DER WÜRDE UROTCITE NA BLAGA
BULGARIA | GERMANY 2023 OPENING JANUARY 25 , 2024
DIRECTED BY STEPHAN KOMANDAREV
WRITING CREDITS : STEPHAN KOMANDAREV , SIMEON VENTSISLAVOV
PRINCIPAL ACTORS : ELI SKORCHEVA , GERASIM GEORGIEV , ROZALIA ABGARIAN , STEFAN DENOLYUBOV
The one bright spot in her bleak , isolated existence is tutoring a lovely young foreigner ( Rozalia Abgarian ). Blaga is teaching her Bulgarian so she can become a citizen . The student is overjoyed to be living in this amazing country with her Bulgarian husband after escaping an unnamed country where the bombs were always falling . Blaga enjoys earning some money on the side to supplement her meager pension . Additionally , she relishes constantly correcting her student for the slightest error . Blaga is a “ grammar Nazi ” who leaves no grammatical error unmentioned , even when encountering her fellow countrymen .
Then disaster strikes . Blaga falls victim to a phone scam and loses all the money ( and her wedding ring ) to swindlers who prey on older folks . But Blaga is a determined woman , and when the police stand helplessly by , she schemes to get her money back . Her moral compass gets lost in the shuffle to bury her husband within the forty-day window . She may have saved his soul , but what about her own ? 114 minutes .
56 HAMBURG HAPPENINGS