site.btaUPDATED LIK Magazine's November Issue Dedicated to CineLibri Festival Presented across BTA's Press Clubs

The November issue of BTA's LIK magazine dedicated to the decade-long history of the CineLibri film and literature festival was presented on Monday simultaneously across BTA's press clubs at home and abroad. LIK's issue traces the development of the forum from its inception in 2015 to its tenth anniversary edition, held this year.

"With the November issue of LIK, we give another direction to these two art forms - cinema and literature," said here BTA Director General Kiril Valchev during the presentation at BTA's MaxiM Hall.

"We present a festival that they say has no analogue in the world. A festival that unites two arts - cinema and literature," said Valchev. He noted that the paper version of the magazine is sent to over 300 cultural institutions in Bulgaria, while LIK's electronic edition can be accessed free of charge on BTA's website.

According to LIK's editor-in-chief and head of BTA's LIK: Culture, Science, Education Directorate, Assoc. Prof. Georgi Lozanov, this issue is emblematic for the new stage of the magazine's development. "There are three stages. First of all, the magazine opened the Bulgarian culture to the Western culture, when this was ideologically very difficult. In the second stage, already at the beginning of the Transition [period of transition from the totalitarian communist regime to democracy that started in 1989], when the fate of Bulgarian culture became new and complex, the magazine began to deal with actual Bulgarian culture, as the curtains of information were lifted. And in its old form it has gradually lost its relevance. The third period is one of memory, cultural memory, but it never loses its connection with the first period. This is an important stage - whether Bulgaria and Bulgarian culture belongs to Western culture. There are many attempts to refute this, to look for other cultural axes of influence and interaction. But with this festival and with this issue the connection with Western European culture is very deep and typical", said Lozanov.

In his words, thanks to CineLibri big names from literature and cinema come, who prove that contemporary culture has no national borders.

Writer Georgi Gospodinov said that the festival makes obvious what has somehow always existed - the connection between cinema and literature. "My dissertation is on cinema and literature in the 1930s and 1940s. Even back then you could see how much the two media owed to each other - how literature entered cinema, and how cinema stepped on literature. Because cinema is the youngest art," said Gospodinov said during the presentation in Sofia.

He recounted how less than a year before his death, famous Bulgarian writer Ivan Vazov  (1850-1921) was approached with a request to allow the cinematography of Under the Yoke: "The classic, instead of saying, 'Run, you goblins!", responded with a note that said, "I give my full permission for the novel Under the Yoke to be cinematographed, and to this end I allow any alteration and intensification of the adventurous moments as the cinematographer desires."

Gospodinov recalled that the first article about cinema was written by Bulgarian literary and theatre critic Ivan Andreychin back in 1907, and was about cinematography, cinema.

"Both arts, literature and cinema, are born in total darkness. It is only in the darkness of the cinema that the miracle is possible, that is, there must be darkness in order for the cinema and what happens to pass along this ray that comes. There is the same darkness in the writing of literature. It is the darkness in the writer's head," Georgi Gospodinov said. 

CineLibri founder, President and Art Director Jacqueline Wagenstein said during the presentation at BTA's MaxiM Hall that the festival is not an art house festival centred on itself, but a festival that addresses the audience and seeks a relationship with it. 

"Thanks to your words and attention, I feel more and more CineLibri is emerging on the world map. Of course, this has been our goal since the festival's inception," she said It is truly one of a kind and  remains the only festival in the world with a competitive international character that is entirely dedicated to the relationship between literature and cinema, noted Wagenstein.

According to her, CineLibri is primarily a film festival that pays great homage to literature, not only by showing adaptations, but also by inviting writers and presenting books. The forum is appreciated by "both the more awake audience looking for broader horizons and the more mainstream audience", she said.

Background

In the introduction of the November issue, Georgi Lozanov points out that "there is (and has been) no other festival like this anywhere in the world, which surprises even its founder herself - Jacqueline Wagenstein. Because, as she says, "this is in fact the most fundamental link between two arts". In his words, ten years ago, "CineLibri appeared on the international art scene to give the public an intellectual insight, guided by professionals, into the proximity between the two arts" - cinema and literature. And to them, a chance to glance at each other, to clarify how they influence each other not only in the creative process but also in their cultural destiny, and with their mutual support, to emerge unscathed from the frequent premonitions of the end of many things- of great narratives, of the author, of art, of reading, of cinema..." Lozanov adds.

In an interview for LIK magazine, Jacqueline Wagenstein says: "CineLibri is an established and unavoidable festival on the Bulgarian scene, but it is also a factor on a global scale. The purpose of what we have achieved over the years is for people to trust us and know that we have chosen for them the best of the global market in the respective genre, because we are tied to the books, but we are not genre-limited," she tells BTA. In the interview, Wagenstein talks about the development of the festival over the years, the choice of guests and a different motto each year. She shares how important the team is and how, thanks to good partnerships in the country, the festival has editions outside the capital.

"Not Only Literature and Not Only Cinema, but "CineLibri"," reads the headline of the article by film critic and historian Petya Alexandrova. She discusses the prerequisites behind the emergence of the festival and its "essence and successes over the ten years of its existence".

"The first and main achievement is the precisely found focus of the festival - the relationship between literature and cinema," writes Petya Alexandrova. "For ten years now, CineLibri has been delighting us every autumn with a crop of fresh films that cross the bridge to literature, and on this bridge we freely move in both directions," she points out.

The magazine runs a thematic chronology of the highlights of the publications about CineLibri, preserved in BTA's archives. The news stories, which have appeared in the agency's news feeds for all ten editions of the forum to date, include information about the periods of the festival, the choice of theme, guests and selected titles, as well as words and emotions shared by the organisers and celebrities attending the festival.

The tenth anniversary edition of CineLibri is also presented through BTA's news stories.

In addition to information about its organization and program, it is also presented with interviews with some of its guests - American actress Ann Cusack, New Zealand-Belgian writer Christine Lehens, Dutch director Misja Pekel, Italian film director, screenwriter and actor Daniele Luchetti, Bulgarian artist, director and Oscar-nominated animator Teodor Ushev, among others.