Dimitar Kutmanov

Zhana, a quiet young woman, lives with her controlling foster father Danail in the remote countryside. Amid her tedious routine, Zhana secretly visits a dog tied to an empty barrel in an abandoned quarry. Soon, Danail discovers her secret.

A film and a 3-screen installation about a woman who manages to maintain her integrity by avoiding the paradigms imposed by the social conditions of existence, focusing instead on the world beyond material dimension with its many limitations. Continual ritual gestures that do not involve obtaining a profit and an irrational faith in an unattainable have become the main basis of the film in which the prosaic reality is not expressed explicitly but through the visual poetry of a town in decay.

In a godforsaken landscape, filmed in transcendental black and white, as if fallen out of time, young Ada lives alone with her ill mother. Her rather lonely existence is characterized by hard work and poverty and as her mother's condition worsens there doesn't seem to be a way out anymore. Ecce homo is a parable about being human, rich in religious symbolism, which dreamily and at the same time sombrely poses existential questions without volunteering answers.

An homage to the city of Plovdiv, the film follows a solitary man who wanders around the empty streets of the city in an attempt to return to his home. Meanwhile, various figures roam the fragmented spaces of the house from his memories, expecting his homecoming.