In this richly atmospheric debut, a hot summer in the Bulgarian countryside gets hotter when a family acquires two extra inhabitants on their parched property – a well-driller and his unruly teenage daughter.
A beautifully crafted, subtly told story… Rarely does a debut feature come along with the visual and narrative confidence of Thirst.
Screened as part of NZIFF 2016
Thirst 2015
Jajda
First-time director Svetla Tsotsorkova draws us into the unique setting of her debut film and the five souls who inhabit it with spellbinding assurance.
On a dusty road somewhere in the Bulgarian countryside a teenage boy lives with his convalescent father and his mother, who takes in laundry from city hotels, hanging row upon row of bedsheets to dry in the hot breeze. It has not rained for months and water is running low. The arrival of a well-driller and his water-divining teenage daughter gradually engulfs the tiny family in a welter of mutual suspicions. The girl is magnetic and unruly, resentful of her father’s dependency and contemptuous of the sheltered, fascinated boy. Trouble brews like a longed-for storm in the stifling summer air.
“Suffused with golden light, the film’s atmospheric widescreen photography contributes to the dreamy sense of otherness that pervades Thirst. A gentle, lilting flute and guitar melody, sparsely employed, is the only music. But for all its style, this is very much a film about five lost people: and it’s a remarkable achievement, on the part of the director, the writers and the actors, that we care about every single one of them.” — Lee Marshall, Screendaily