Voevoda

Guys, I created an IMDb account just to review this movie ! I am not sure who are the people calling this movie " Excellent", but this is so unrealistic , that I am having a hard time calling it even decent! In short : dragging , awfully boring, chopped /fragmented story line like an old vinyl that skips through time. Poor acting . Poor directing . It is way too zoomed in, that it is even painful to the eye, especially after 2,5 hours! Barely any dialog and whenever - straight up stupid and shallow. Some moments leave you asking yourself " what is really happening right now"? It is sad that even the characters in the movie do not age proportionally along the storyline. It is insulting to the audience , watching some characters aging overtime and the rest - looking exactly the same like 20 years ago . The camera is zoomed in, the whole time so while looking at some actor's black heads and skin pores , one cannot understand or see what's going on around. " Action " scenes , if those could be called that way at all, are a painful mixture of shaky , zoomed in images , often blurred , accompanied by weird sounds. I will not remember anything of this movie at all, just the price of the eye lubricant I had to buy so I get rid of the eye ache this " shake-ie" gave me! The other two negative reviews are unfortunately true and real and depict what's all this about. I am really sorry to say, but I would not recommend this movie to anyone I like!

I loved the movie! This film made me feel proud to be a Bulgarian. Great acting, great story, well made. It truly made me go back in time, and appreciate the struggles of my ancestors. Everything was made with good taste, believable costumes and surroundings. I loved that everything was filmed without artificial light, with great cinematography as a whole. The characters are real. The acting is profound and you feel like you're watching a documentary. The director is playing the main role and this make things really interesting- great acting and directing. The movie was made with great preparation- research and character development. I highly recommend it!

I was really excited to see this movie after the trailer and mostly because of the music of the Bulgarian band Kayno Yesno Slonce. But from the beginning till the end this movie was a full disappointment for me, having nothing to do with most of the reviews that are spawning in the Bulgarian media, so I sat down to write a review. The movie tries to escape the socialist Bulgarian TV movie style and fails. The actors play like it's theater and their language, which isn't old Ottoman Bulgarian, nor some kind of clear dialect, but something with the pathos and diction of a former socialist memorial speech. There is hardly any authenticity in language, appearance, haircuts and so on. The motivations of the heroes remain unclear and their psychological development is so awfully depicted that I wished that this movie was just an action flick, it would have made it much better to watch that way. But, as in all Bulgarian movies, there is not enough money for the action scenes, so don't expect real effect in battles, but just action tricks, used in the early cinema to fool the viewer that action takes place. The music of Kayno Yeslo Slonce is sometimes used without any connection to the scene. You can hear the same music in a love and in a battle scene.

There is not much to say about this "movie". I understand the idea to create something different, but in this case the DP should be fired and never given the chance to shoot any other movie ever again. Everything is zoomed in the entire time, but the focus was not on the actor's faces, but instead on their chins, necks, back of their heads, shoulders, back, legs and so on, leaving the audience to wonder who is talking to who and what's going on. And that is during the entire movie leaving you with headache and no simpathy to any of the character's. Total waist of time, energy and potential of all those actors that were trying to give that thing some sense.

I liked the film in general. It is definitely not the best Bulgarian film in the past few years, but it is good enough. The camera work is indeed a bit strange in some scenes, but at the end it is more important what the story is all about and the characters involved in it.

I liked the cast and the pace of the film. The balance between the drama and the adventure is very good. Music and effects are also descent.

The most important part is that modern Bulgarian cinema is getting better and better these days, most probably because they don't count that much on government financing anymore and more and more films are being produced every year.