Magnificent 7 2013/4
Ilian Metev, director of ”Sofia’s Last Ambulance”, started his friday masterclass at Magnificent7 festival in Belgrade playing Bach on his violin, quite a generous gift to the workshoppers from the young Bulgarian artist, who had a career as a violinist, has studied fine art in London and ended up at the National Film School in Beaconsfield in England, where he graduated in 2008 with the very succesful film ”Goleshevo”.
Metev made the link from music to the ambulance film saying that ”I often think of films as tensions and releases, like in music”. That is indeed a perfect reference to a film that is so much linked to the cases that the three in the ambulance meet on their shifts in the Bulgarian capital. People suffering in the back of the ambulance, people talking to doctor Krassi and nurse Mila in the appartments, you never see the patients, perfect choice, always tension and then the more uplifting moments of smoking and relaxing between the cases, small talk about life and love, or getting out to get some apples from a tree…
There is no music in the film, and yet, as said Metev, ”the ambulance is like an orchestra” of sounds. He told us how the sound was recorded separately, he explained the position of the cameras in ”the cockpit” of the ambulance, and how he, in the editing was ”constantly hunting for eloquent moments”.
A lot of questions from the workshop participants were about the three wonderful people in the ambulance. How they are today, what they earn – which is nothing more than 300€ per month – that is why the driver Pramen has two other jobs – and about Metev’s frustration that the film is considered as a piece of art (indeed it is!) but far too little attention has been put on the social reality that it shows, when it has been screened in Bulgaria.
