BLUEBERRY HILL
ХЪЛМЪТ НА БОРОВИНКИТЕ



Bulgaria, 2001, 108 minutes, colour

31 December 1999. A prosperous German actor is travelling by plane to Istanbul to celebrate New Year with friends, but his plane has to land in Sofia and because of bad meteorological conditions cannot go further by air. Having no other possibility, he gets on the train to Istanbul. During his journey he falls off the train. He comes to in the middle of a strange inn, built on top of a railway, and the train passes through the inn. The visitors help him regain his consciousness. There is a strange girl in the inn. She's the daughter of the inn-keeper. He goes to the village together with this girl in order to find a telephone… In the meantime one of the passengers in the train, "Mr. Curious," starts pretending to be the German. The ticket-collectors cannot see any difference between the two men. In the village the foreigner comes across a village wedding: the mayor has arranged the wedding of his son… The mayor's daughter, Kalina, speaks English and she takes the foreigner to the municipality, where he's able to use the phone. Time has passed. Policemen find the body of the Mr.Curious by the railway, mutilated after the fall. They find documents in his pocket. They announce the foreigner is dead. After the accident the girl takes the foreigner to a small stone built house nearby a lake. There lives the beautiful woman from the train. He stays with her. The next morning he wakes up, he's alone. The beautiful woman has gone. He leaves the house with the strange woman again. An old truck picks them up on the road. They reach the same old inn with the huge gates and the railway in the middle. The holder of the inn tells his story. He tells the stories of his visitors. You can hear an train engine whistle. It's Sunday. The train arrives a few minutes earlier. The inn is smashed into. The train sweeps it off together with the people inside. This happens before the eyes of the foreigner. He takes the first train. Everybody's there at the platform, they're all seeing him off. All was just a dream. He rushes out, runs through the corridor of the train, he opens the door and he jumps out…

"Blueberry Hill" is a frenetic kaleidoscope of people, events, low round dining tables, curses, drunkenness and love. Love unarticulated, suspicious and wild. Balkan-like. It seems all of the most gifted Bulgarian actors were put in front of the camera by the director Alexander Morphov and were given the freedom to do what they should, as well as what they should not. The film itself is constantly changing its appearance from funny to sad, from smart to foolish, from sympathetic to vulgar, overtaken by the artistic rage of trying to put the ghost back into the bottle, while actually at the same time enchanted by the fact that it is lost. The vulgar tenderness of this unsubdued film of hooligan behaviour is a declaration of love to the craft, to the kin and to itself."

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