site.btaBulgaria's "On the Other Side" Wins Best Feature Documentary, Honorable Mention at Best Film Awards

The Bulgarian documentary "On the Other Side" won Best Feature Documentary at the Winter Edition 2023/24 of the Best Film Awards in the United States. It also won an honorable mention in the Golden Doc: Best Feature Documentary category, the production team said.

Best Film Awards is an organization that brings IMDb Qualifying Online Film Festival with screening for filmmakers around the world. The film competed with 20 more entries.

The documentary has been entered for 20 more international festivals in 2024 but Best Film Awards is the most prestigious one, the team said.

The project of director Nikolay Rusakiev and journalist Martin Georgiev, who is writer and director of photography, was filmed in April 2023. The film is a one-hour story about Martin's two-week stay in Moscow, Donetsk, Mariupol, St. Petersburg.

"Martin Georgiev was admitted to the other side of the front in Ukraine. He had already been to Odesa, Mykolaiv and Kyiv at the beginning of the war, when all the Ukrainians were fleeing in the opposite direction. Back then, he wanted to see the other side - Russia, Donetsk, and why not Mariupol," the team said.

"Martin is a journalist from a NATO Member State, declared by Russia's President Putin an 'unfriendly country'. It seemed impossible that he would be allowed to go there. But exactly one year after the conflict began, he was granted a visa and accreditation, then spent two weeks on the other side. Alone. This probably makes him the only journalist who was in both Ukraine and Russia while there is a war going on between them. He has two military accreditations. Moreover, Martin Georgiev was certainly the last foreigner to visit the headquarters of the private military company Wagner Group before Prigozhin's mutiny and death," the team said.