Making Friends with the Idea of a Father
Director and cinematographer Nikolay Stefanov embarks on an emotional and psychological journey to investigate the mysterious death of his father. Almost 30 years later, Nikolay is trying to find the reason why he was killed on the streets of their hometown. The filmmaker is digging into the police archives and the fading memories of his father’s friends — exploring whether the murder was a crime of passion, a theft-gone-wrong, or a random act of violence in the chaos of the early post-Communist 1990s in Bulgaria. At the same time, Nikolay is about to become a father as well — for the third time in his life. While unraveling the details around the murder of his own father and awaiting the birth of his third child, he’s trying to fix a somewhat broken relationship with his 20-year-old elder son and to make the best of the time he has with his quickly growing teenage daughter. Merging archive material, first-person narrative, and real-time shooting, In Circles/Father is a blend between observational, participatory, and poetic documentary cinema that delves into the complexity of family ties and the difficulty of speaking about feelings and buried secrets in our closest circle. The investigation of a true crime turns into a touching and intimate exploration of what it means to be a father in this day and time.