Fest Track On Sirk TV Film Review: NINA ROZA [Berlinale - Berlin, Germany]

The intent of "Nina Roza" [Competition] is its use of parallel storytelling in real time to show an essence of time lost without getting lost in flashbacks. The film follows Mihail [Galin Stoev], a Bulgarian immigrant now living in Canada [Montreal]. He emigrated there in the early 1990s after the death of his wife and brought his daughter with him. Like some other films this year, there are some interesting diatribes between East and West, before and after the Iron Block that still stick...and of course with the festival taking place in Berlin, some of those ideas and feelings always exist in the background. Milhail has trouble speaking to his daughter and to come to terms with what he left behind...he just needed to leave. There are some pieces of music played which have might have been more propaganda in the day but it is the sound of his (and his daughter's) youth which interesting translates into a kind of removed nostalgia. The opening shot of the film is Milhail's grown up daughter Rose surrounded at her son's birthday party and yet she seems utterly alone. She comes to see Milhail for understanding but he can't place what he needs to do since he himself has not come to terms with exactly what he feels. What leads him back to Bulgaria is when a child prodigy of art goes viral in a village with some of her paintings. Milhail's benefactor through whom he curates his gallery in Montreal wants him to authenticate because nobody else is more qualified but also speaks the language. Milhail rallies against returning and yet everything (including Rose wanting her son to learn Bulgarian) pushes him forward.

Milhail arrives and tells his driver it has been 28 years since he had last been in the country. Before he leaves Montreal, there is also a brief element that his only sister is there and yet he never really talks to her. Milhail arrives in the rural village and with his more Western eye is simply looking for a scam, a small town trying to make some money off of paintings really made by someone else and not a nine-year-old girl. Over the course of meeting the painter's mom, her uncles and the town through local parties (they say no one new comes to see them anymore), he starts to understand the town. During one scene he sings a song he remembers with his wife that the party starts singing in his honor. It is the whole village singing it and then the sound melts away to the tune itself with him mouthing it and then his wife (in a flashback) starts singing it in concert. This moment more than any other captures the inherent essence of the film because it shows what he lost and what memory still waits for him. The trip though is to determine whether or not the young girl is a fraud. In an interesting turn of events he understands what the painter in her wants when she shows him where she secretly paints so the evil witch (her agent) won't get them. The irony is about the inevitably of success or change since it alters what the original goal is. What is interesting is how clear the girl (who is actually played by twins) understands what Milhail took a while to comprehend. Home can be lost but then regained. Doing something to help her he realizes might take away the spark of artistic inspiration which was the spark point in the first place...but that too is an inevitability. That is why the next point of structure in the film (which this reviewer won't give away) brings the texture around full circle. "Nina Roza" is subtle and slower paced in what it is trying to show but that doesn't make it any less powerful. It just uses simple, almost novelistic storytelling to tell a character piece of memory and home lost. B

By Tim Wassberg