Dir: Kristina Grozeva | Drama, Bulgaria 2026
Kristina Grozeva, who co-directs Black Money for White Nights with her long-time collaborator Petar Valchanov, has established herself as one of the most incisive chroniclers of contemporary Bulgarian society.
Their films expose the everyday compromises through which corruption becomes normalised, combining sharp social observation with a dark, often absurdist humour. In The Lesson (2014), a schoolteacher’s financial desperation drives her towards increasingly desperate choices; Glory (2016) turns a railway worker’s act of honesty into a grotesque encounter with bureaucratic self-interest; while The Father (2019) explores grief and family relationships through offbeat comedy and surreal detours. Their more recent Triumph (2024) takes their taste for the absurd into still stranger territory.
Black Money for White Nights draws on this familiar blend of social criticism and mordant comedy, but shifts the focus to the intimate world of an ageing couple whose modest ambitions are undone by their own accumulated compromises.
Their story unfolds within the same moral landscape that defines Grozeva and Valchanov’s earlier work, where financial pressure, institutional indifference and the desire for a better life can make questionable choices appear reasonable. By concentrating on a relationship shaped by shared history and mutual dependence, the film also brings a more personal dimension to their recurring concerns. The couple’s predicament is not only a reflection of wider social conditions; it becomes a test of loyalty, responsibility and the stories people tell themselves in order to live with what they have done.
The film’s visual approach gives this domestic drama a lively, watchable tension, finding comic possibilities in the couple’s routines, silences and increasingly precarious attempts to stay in control. As their plans begin to unravel, the narrative gathers the momentum of a darkly comic thriller, with each new complication exposing another layer of deception while keeping the audience alert to the possibility of both disaster and farce. The result is a film that is socially pointed but also richly entertaining: an intimate story propelled by suspense, awkward humour and the pleasure of watching ordinary people improvise their way through an extraordinary mess
Nominated for European Film Awards | World Premiere at Karlovy Vary