Was one of nine films under consideration to be the Bulgarian entry for the Best International Feature Film Oscar at the 95th Academy Awards, but did not end up being selected, losing out to Mother (2022) and then to In the heart of the machine (2022) when Mother was rejected due to having over 50% of English dialogue.
The film was inspired by the true story of a blogger who was managing a camping site on the Bulgarian seaside and who would encounter dead dolphins on the beach and bury them until he got fed up with the situation and started writing about it and revealing absurd situations, but mixed with elements of other true stories, such as the retired investigator who was inspired by an unrelated real case.
Co-Writer/Director Dragomir Sholev explains that the title references the film's narrative structure thus: ""It resembles a fish bone - a spinal cord with the main fable and thin bones coming out of it in the shape of small stories. Each of those small stories reveals a different issue, each bone gets stuck differently in the characters' throats. Also, as each story introduces a new protagonist, it could be perceived as an independent one. However, they are forming part of a bigger context, part of the fish bone structure. Without whichever
of them, the construction would fall apart. This approach was provoked by the real story which was full of absurd and abstract details".
The script was developed over the course of six to seven years, with the three co-writers initially working together before Dragomir Sholev continued on his own, with Razvan Radulescu as script consultant. By March 2017, the film was expected to shoot in Spring 2018, but production did not begin until September 2019.