Bulgarian cinema is enjoying a moment this year, starting with Valeska Grisebach’s extraordinary crime drama The Dreamed Adventure, which won the Jury Prize at Cannes back in May. The similarly incisive Black Money for White Nights, by Kristina Grozeva and Petar Valchanov, is very much cut from the same cloth, set in the same post-Soviet black-market economy where everyone is on the take. Some people, however, take more than others, with cops and crooks snagging the lion’s share while ordinary people divvy up the scraps.
Marina (Tanya Shahova) and her husband Gosha (Ivan Savov) are very much in the latter category. Marina is a midwife, and patients desperate for top-tier treatment routinely slip her an envelope full of cash, which she shares with her colleagues. Gosha, a local station master, has a side-hustle of his own, turning a blind eye while bootleggers siphon diesel from the tankers that sit idly on the train tracks. One night, Marina comes home from a normal day’s work and tells him, “We only need 85 more leva.” “Only?” Gosha sighs, at the prospect of having to raise an amount that, over in the States, would be less than 50 bucks.
Marina, however, is not looking to the west; her dream is to go further east on a trip fueled by fantasies that her real father was a Russian soldier, if her mother’s secret cache of love letters are anything to go by. It will be the holiday of a lifetime; making a play on an old Bulgarian saying — which translates roughly as money saved for a rainy day — the couple are putting their ill-gotten gains towards what’s effectively a pilgrimage to the White Nights of Fyodor Dostoevsky’s St. Petersburg, then taking the Trans-Siberia Express from Moscow to China. The bill comes to 10,310 leva ($6k), with a 3% discount for cash.
Sharp eyes will notice that Bulgaria adopted the Euro in January of 2026, but the filmmakers delay the big reveal — what year is this? — for maximum impact. Unaware, we watch as Marina puts on a fashion show for her friends and family, modeling all the outfits she plans to wear to the Pushkin Museum, the Mariinsky Theater and the Catherine Palace. A few days later, a newsreader announces that Russia has invaded Ukraine. “What does that mean?” Marina wonders. “We’re far away,” shrugs Gosha. “By summer, no one will even remember.” Nevertheless, they return to the travel agent, who offers to rebook their now-verboten flights to St. Petersburg from Belgrade, a conveniently non-EU city.
As in the pitch-black Blaga’s Lessons, which won Karlovy Vary’s Crystal Globe Competition in 2023 and went on to become Bulgaria’s official Oscar submission, no dream goes unpunished in Sofia’s breadline culture. First of all, there is no bus to Belgrade, as promised, and in a nicely judged detail Marina and Gosha get caught between a Pride march and an anti-Pride march in the capital. Finally, Gosha calls his brother-in-law Kosyo (Ivan Barnev), a taxi driver-slash-heavy metal guitarist, to take them there. During a brief stop-off at Kosyo’s home, Marina’s rather more worldly sister Lucy (Margita Gosheva) smells a rat and makes a phone call: The travel company has gone bust, and there is no record of their booking (“Why didn’t you choose a normal country?” Lucy asks).
Was it a scam? It’s never quite explained whether what happened was deliberate, but it does seem more likely that the company simply went under, since they owe money to many other people. The police don’t care either way, driving Gosha into the arms of a gangster called The Tank, who promises to get him his money back within a week, for 40% commission. As you might imagine, things can turn on a dime with a character called The Tank, and while Marina gets into a feud with her sister about a 30-year-old slight and a very personal secret about her childless marriage, they do. Then things turn very dark indeed.
Only a year ago, this film would have seemed quite quaint and even alien to western viewers, but with the cost-of-living crisis creeping up everywhere in the fallout from the Iran war, this story now seems most unnervingly timely, as, does Marina’s rose-tinted, almost MAGA-like obsession with Tsarist Russia. Surprisingly, though, at its heart, Black Money for White Nights isn’t so much a brutal take on late-capitalist politics as a beautifully acted and emotionally raw love story, and while it might end on the bleakest terms possible, there is a moving promise of reconciliation that plays out — in dialogue only — as the closing credits crawl, after the seemingly final fade to black.
Title: Black Money For White Nights
Festival: Karlovy Vary (Crystal Globe Competition)
Directors: Kristina Grozeva, Petar Valchanov
Screenwriters: Kristina Grozeva, Petar Valchanov, Decho Taralezhkov
Cast: Tanya Shahova, Ivan Savov, Margita Gosheva, Ivan Barnev, Sibila Petrova
Sales: Abraxas Films
Running time: 1 hr 34 mins
