THE STORY – A viral video of an 8-year-old Bulgarian artist catches the eye of a major
art collector. Mihail is sent there, 30 years after leaving his home country,
to assess the value of the girl’s work and confront the ghosts of his past.
THE CAST – Galin Stoev, Ekaterina Stanina, Sofia Stanina, Chiara Caselli, Michelle Tzontchev & Elena Atanasova
THE TEAM – Geneviève Dulude-de Celles (Director/Writer)
THE RUNNING TIME – 103 Minutes
Memory is a fickle curator, often choosing to archive our most painful chapters in the deep, unvisited basements of the psyche. In Geneviève Dulude-de Celles’ “Nina Roza,” this internal stagnation is externalized through Mihail (Galin Stoev), a Bulgarian-Canadian museum curator who has spent nearly three decades meticulously crafting a life in Montreal that is conspicuously absent of his origin. The film opens with a sequence of striking choral music at a party, yet the camera lingers on a woman, later revealed to be Mihail’s daughter, Roza (Michelle Tzontchev), who exists at a profound mental distance from the revelry. She moves in a trance, a ghost among the living, setting a tone of haunting displacement that defines this meditative, if occasionally frustrating, exploration of heritage and the silent architecture of grief.
Dulude-de Celles, who previously earned the Crystal Bear at Berlinale for “A Colony,” brings her signature empathetic gaze to this narrative. She specializes in the delicate anatomy of identity, and “Nina Roza” is at its most potent when investigating the friction between Mihail’s curated present and his repressed past. Mihail is a specialist in contemporary art who is commissioned to authenticate the work of Nina (played with disarming maturity by twins Ekaterina and Sofia Stanina), an eight-year-old painting prodigy living in a remote Bulgarian village. While Mihail initially views the trip as a professional obligation and a potential scam involving Nina’s parents, the journey inevitably becomes a vessel for a much larger reconciliation.
However, the film’s commitment to authenticity often manifests as a deliberate, sometimes taxing slowness. For a significant portion of the runtime, the audience is kept at a frustrating distance from Mihail’s interiority. He is a man who thinks in French to avoid the weight of his mother tongue, and while his refusal to engage with his daughter’s desire to teach his grandson Bulgarian is narratively significant, the film’s lack of verbal communication makes it difficult to anchor oneself in his struggle. We see him navigate his homeland with a mixture of familiarity and alienation, the camera focusing in tight close-ups on the textures of a world he tried to forget, but the script’s insistence on silence can feel more like a barrier than a subtextual choice. A subplot involving Roza’s crumbling marriage and her own sense of distance feels underdeveloped, leaving her character more as a thematic mirror for Mihail than a fully realized individual.
The relationship between the curator and the child artist provides the most compelling insights into Mihail’s character. Nina’s innocent, piercing questions—”Do nightmares stop when you get older?”—strip away Mihail’s professional veneer. At first, Nina refuses to paint as a rebellion over a gallery owner, Giulia Mancini (Chiara Caselli), taking all her paintings. But when Mihail discovers her secret stash of works, and she becomes comfortable with him, the mystery of whether Nina’s work is authentic is no longer important. It’s the question Mihail leaves with: How do you preserve a child’s memory, and how do you take care of it? These are questions inspired by being back in his home country and the memories ignited by Nina of his own daughter, Roza.
As Mihail wanders through the streets he once inhabited, where the memory of his deceased wife still breathes in the shadows, the memory he has been running from, the film reaches a stirring, cathartic peak. The use of Bulgarian music as a recurring theme, particularly a moment where a woman’s voice seems to replace Mihail’s own as he sings, creates a visceral sense of the ghosts that haunt him. His confrontation with his sister, who views his departure as a betrayal, underscores the complexity of the immigrant experience and the abandonment inherent in self-preservation.
“Nina Roza” is an evocative study of the necessity of creation, framing art as the essential, if messy, architecture we built to shelter ourselves from the weight of our own histories. While its pacing may test the patience of some, and its narrative gaps leave certain character arcs feeling thin, the performances and Joseph Marchand’s evocative score ensure the emotional landing is felt. Mihail’s final, unspoken question, “Have I taken good care of her?” referring to both his daughter and the memory of his wife, is a plea for forgiveness. It is a reminder that while we may run to save ourselves, the destination is rarely as important as the courage required to finally look back at what we left behind.
