The weeklong International Golden Chest festival for television film productions comes to a close this Sunday in Plovdiv. The 26th edition of the festival included 12 Bulgarian films and 25 foreign films produced last year. Among the Bulgarian entries were Christmas Eve, The Wanderer Records, The Autumn of 1946, Rage, Blueberry Hill and the Devil's Tail.

The film competition also includes The Prize by Magi Halvadjian and Fate As a Rat by Kosta and Ivan Pavlov. A Letter to America, which is also on the list of entries in the festival, was recently featured in a film fest in Canada.

The chairmen of the jury are Georgi Danailov (writer) and Stanimir Trifonov (director).

"It was extremely hard to select 12 titles from the televised films and documentaries," said Vlado Daverov, director of film productions with Bulgarian National Television. "In spite of all the problems that Bulgarian productions have, our seventh art (cinema) is becoming alive and growing faster."

Approximately 14 countries were expected to visit Plovdiv for the festival this year. The awards will be presented on Sunday, the occasion being marked with a grand celebration. Many of Bulgaria's artistic elite will participate in the event. Famous Bulgarian singer Stenli will perform his song from the movie Rage by Ilian Simeonov.

One of the foreign films visiting Plovdiv will be Scene of the Crime - Out of Control by Walter Bannert (Austria). The movie talks about a sensation created by watercolour paintings by the famous Austrian painter Egon Schiele. A Jewish woman from America claims she has inheritance rights to two of the pictures and is looking for proof. But right after the paintings are put on display, they are stolen.

Other guest films include War and Peace (Russia), Ethnic Cleansing (Japan), The Voice of Lili Marlene (Germany) and Bucurest Memorial (Romania).

Acts of Worship (U.S.) by Rosemary Rodriguez will be presented on Sunday. "Seven years ago I sat down to write the story - my story," said Rodriguez. "Two years previous to that, I was homeless, broke, dirty and in a lot of pain - both emotionally and physically."

For several years after that, Rodriguez wandered around doing whatever she had to do, as far as the story goes. "I pursued my passion - drugs. I lived with shame, guilt and self-hatred for so long because I believed that I just did not have the willpower to stop. I felt like a loser the whole time," she said.

There's no need to say anything about Lili Marlene's story, according to some of the organizers of the festival. The two-part documentary is based on Lale Andersen's diaries and reveals what was hidden behind the Lili Marlene phenomenon. In the film, the boundaries between song and singer dissolve.

Another documentary scheduled for tomorrow is War and Peace. It tells about a Russian civil war and the very complex correlation of two realities - art and life.

In Ethnic Cleansing, facing a superior Serb army, Bosnia employed American public relations to vilify Serbia with the catchphrase "Ethnic Cleansing." This documentary exposes the information that branding the former Yugoslavia genocidal continues to shape world opinion of the Balkans, and, more specifically, Kosovo.