Goat Milk Festival Brings Films, Discussions and Music to the Bela Rechka Village in Bulgaria
Balkan Travellers
The festival, focused around the theme of personal and collective memory, provides “at one hand the relaxed ambiance of one authentic Bulgarian Balkan village like Bela Rechka with its hospitality, goat milk and walnut trees and, [and] on the other hand, innovative and new approaches from the European debates and art world in the field of memories, identity and new culture,” according to its official website.
“The real aim of the festival,” its organisers say, “is to meet people and worlds that usually don’t mix and to provoke new insights and questions about our own memories and their connection with our present.”
This year, Iranian photographer Babak Salari who chronicles the lives of those living on the margins of society, will present his work in Afghanistan and Iraq. Bulgarian director Stefan Komandarev will showcase his film Alphabet of Hope and Polish Krzysztof Czyzewski will hold an open talk and reading seminar on the meaning of the game and the book The Glass Bead Game by Hermann Hesse. Elysabeth Vykoukal, group psychoanalyst from the Sigmund Freud University in Vienna will present a psychoanalytical view on memory.
The exhibition 360 degrees Bulgaria of Aleksander Ivanov’s 120 aerial photographs, which BalkanTravellers.com reported on earlier this week, will be presented by one of its curators, Radmila Mladenova.
Adem Murat from Turkey will hold a belly dancing workshop, while the Plovdiv-based Sariev gallery will hold a souvenir-making workshop, led by prominent Bulgarian young artists.
Open-air concerts will conclude each day’s events. Bulgarian singer Miroslava Katsarova will perform jazz on Friday night. On Saturday, the Dulce Canto group for Jewish music and the Salamura group, which performs traditional Turkish songs, will be on. The Mamapapa&friends group from Prague, Bratislava and Berlin will play music from Central Europe on Sunday evening.
Visit the festival's website for the full programme and directions on how to get to Bela Rechka
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