Stefan Kitanov is the creator and the director of one of the most important international cinema events in Bulgaria, one that also holds its place as a key film festival in South East Europe. He is the reason internationally acclaimed filmmakers such as Wim Wenders, Sir Alan Parker, Terry Jones, Andrei Konchalovsky, Jiri Menzel, Emir Kosturica, Lech Kowalski and about 700 other young talents and producers have attended the festival over the past 11 years.

The 12th Sofia International Film Festival (SIFF) will be held from March 6 to 12 in Sofia with additional programmes in Sofia, Plovdiv and Bourgas (March 17 to 23). SIFF is one of the few places where Bulgarian cinema fans can find outstanding films and filmmakers from all over the world, together, in one event, and made readily accessible.
Kitanov was hard to reach for an interview and because of his heavy schedule I thought that I would meet a stressed-out workaholic. But Kita, as everyone calls him, came across as a calm and straightforward man, looking somewhat artistically careless.

Kitanov has lived and studied in Britain. He has been the director and programmer of Dom na Kinoto, the most important art house cinema in Bulgaria. After establishing the production companies RFF International (1994) and Art Fest (2001), he began to organise annual film festivals in Bulgaria. He has organised (as director and producer) Music Film Fest (1997, 1998), Sofia Music & Film Fest (1999, 2000) and Sofia International Film Festival (since 2001), as well as several smaller film events.

I asked him about the conceptualisation and evolution of the festival over the last 12 years; Kitanov instead chose to relate his enduring love affair with the cinema from its very origins.

"I was born on October 31 1961. My astrological sign is Scorpio. My parents didn’t even know they’d have a male child. My crush on music and cinema started soon after I started to get to know the world around me. Neither I nor my parents ever believed that my life would be connected to cinema to such an extent. Becoming a film festival director was not my original ambition. This was an evolutionary process.”

Soon after Kitanov became the director of Dom na Kinoto, he started to put together thematic film programmes and organise small festivals.

“Then naturally a moment came when I longed to create something on a larger scale,” Kitanov told The Sofia Echo.

The Sofia Film Festival started as a small event, as improvisation, something that was meant to be groovy and chill.

“The festival was a continuation of the Rock Film Festivals that were held in Dom na Kinoto,” Kitanov said. “But this implied certain restrictions to the festival’s format – the movies shown had to be connected to specific music and musical events. At a certain moment, this started to bore me. I wanted to give the Bulgarian audience the opportunity to watch a good variety of contemporary, worthwhile films. Sofia International Film Festival in its present format is no way inferior to any other international film festival held anywhere around the world. Bulgarians can see premiere movies presented by their own creators – some of the biggest names in the film industry,” Kitanov said.

Selecting the festival’s screening programme is one of the most important aspects of Kitanov’s work:

“At the very beginning I was the one looking for the right movies. I didn’t travel as much as I do now and I had to orientate things by reading. Then I started to travel and receive information right from the source. Now my work is a compilation of reading, visiting cinema events and watching movies at home that people send me. The festival has now reached the level when many filmmakers and elite promotion companies want to see their movie screened at the festival. This is great, on the one hand, because it gives us the opportunity to discover new names and movies that haven’t been shown anywhere. On the other hand, it causes the festival’s director and his partners many inconveniences because in the period between Christmas and New Year’s Eve, when we are supposed to be having fun somewhere with our families, we are buried in boxes of DVDs that we should watch. But this is our own choice and I don’t regret it.”

Kitanov cited as his greatest achievement his ability to attract big names to the film festival: “This is a part of the natural development of every big cultural event. This is the only way for an event of this kind to create its image before the world,” he said.

“When a legend like Wim Wenders has to choose from, for example, 20 events in his heavy schedule, he knows about Sofia, and he chooses Sofia – this what I can say about the festival’s image we managed to create.

“There are various ways to reach the ‘big fish’ and arrange for them to come to the festival. Friendships and contacts that a person like me has created in the course of his work are what really count. Of course this is a matter of chance, of coincidences, as well. Very often I grab someone’s hand and say to him/her: ‘Hello, I organise the film festival in Sofia. Do you happen to have some free time in March?’ Sometimes the answer I receive is ‘Sofia? That’s sounds interesting.’ This is what happened with the director Volker Schlondorff, who is visiting us again this year, and with Sir Alan Parker (a guest at the 10th Sofia Film Festival). I was introduced to Parker at the Warsaw Film Festival by my friend Stefan Laudyn, who is the festival’s director. We sat over a glass of beer and I asked him if he could visit us in Sofia in March. I saw him again after a month in London. We had a glass of white wine, curiously enough, on Poland Street. We arranged for his visit to Sofia Film Fest in March and then he gave me his book of caricatures. I told him: ‘Why don’t we organise an exhibition with your drawings in Sofia?’ He thought this a nice idea and said that no one had ever thought of it. So that’s how the first exhibition of Sir Alan Parker’s caricatures in the world happened to be in Sofia.”

Asked why there is such a great interest in Bulgaria towards alternative, not-for-the masses cinema, because that’s what the festival focuses on, Kitanov said: “Bulgaria is a cultured country. In every cultured country there are people who praise various forms of art. It is normal for a European country to have an audience that is interested in cinema products that raise questions but don’t provide ready answers, a cinema that makes people think and talk. In all these years, I’ve been interested how to enlarge this audience. After we entered an epoch ruled by the market, Bulgarians somehow lost their esteem for and interest in alternative movies, or, as I prefer to call them, non-Hollywood movies. Actually I classify movies as good and bad.

“However, I talk about the right to choose. The market was so flooded with movies for the masses produced by the major companies that no one else had any chance to succeed. It is very difficult for the generations raised after 1989 to distinguish and find the Different, the Alternative. So my purpose is to promote to these young people important and innovative works of modern world cinema and to encourage this cultured audience.”

Not-to-miss films:
-Which Way Today, directed by Rangel Vulchanov
-12, directed by Nikita Mihalkov
-Goya’s Ghosts, directed by Milos Forman
-The Edge of Heaven, directed by Fatih Akin
-Duska, directed by Jos Stelling
-The World Is Big and Salvation Lurks around the Corner, directed by Stefan Komandarev
-I’m Not There, directed by Todd Haynes
-The 11th Hour, produced by Leonardo DiCaprio
-Generation: Lost and Found, an omnibus film
-The Mosquito Problem and Other Stories, directed by Andrey Paounov
-Corridor No 8, directed by Boris Despodov

For the programme of Sofia Film Fest 2008 click here