Vasil Urumov Street - touches to a portrait
Documentary short film
November 18, 2023, 5:00 p.m.
Lucky House of Cinema

What is hidden behind the name written on the sign on "Vasil Urumov" street in Plovdiv 2019 ECOC?...
A unique creative personality with a multi-layered influence on the cultural climate of the city in the 1960s and 1970s...
A Bulgarian poet who was forbidden to publish, but his colleagues dedicated enthusiastic poems to him... Journalist, art and theater critic, of whom the artists of Plovdiv painted a series of portraits in appreciation of his presentations... And who, fired from work for rebelling against the totalitarian system, for years, as an independent reviewer, covered artistic, literary and theatrical events and became "an irreplaceable person who almost single-handedly fills cultural gaps in Plovdiv, doing without ostentation what is the duty of entire collectives and institutions"...
Irresponsible communist repression led to his early death.
Vasil Urumov (1930-1979) - "Such a Plovdiv phenomenon that if it didn't exist we would invent it... As our likeness and our antipode..."
Our film is a poetic essay on the spiritual presence of an intellectual of unique charm, "dwelling in modern times, still unattainable to our contemporaries". We wish to share the amazement of the researchers at the contrast between the officially published work and the unofficial, unpopular and forgotten heritage, unexpectedly close to our modern worldview. To document the discovery that his contemporaries perceived him as something more than a poet and journalist – that wonderful weirdo who proved that it was possible to live freely in an alternative reality that seemed impossible to them in the totalitarian atmosphere of the time. In his life choice we find the true intellectual legacy, that powerful moral impulse that throws a bridge between generations - some ignorant and others who don't want to admit to themselves what they have been putting up with during the communist regime.
This is the natural process of reviving memory, the way to overcome "today's ignorance and the guilty conscience of yesterday's indifference ... to share with belated gratitude the lyric pearls scattered with generous modesty by a spiritual aristocrat."
Never in the role of victim... "Happy as a stolen second..."
*The project will be realized by director George Kaytzanov in co-authorship with Svetlana Urumova, daughter of the poet.