ZooLand
ZooLand is a non-linear narrative film with documentary elements and its main concept is based on dreams, memories, and diary fragments occurring during the communism in Soviet Bulgaria. The compelling structure of archival images blurs the lines between past and present following a boy and a girl’s story as a flashback of their past. The film combines narrative scenes with childhood memories and documentary elements representing the “collective memory” of the past that doesn’t exist anymore or at least not in the material world.
Through an intimate look at my mother’s diaries, notes ,and poems as a person who lived during the political regime and its end, I have delved into the depths of the psychological, emotional and physical trauma experienced by individuals and society and how this trauma has been passed on to following generations. Two key focal points have guided my research so far: the Personal versus the Communal, highlighting the implications of trauma, and the topic of internal emigration of the individual as a survival strategy and the trauma as an event that doesn’t go away after physical death but it’s passed between generations.