VASIL URUMOV STREET - PLOVDIV - touches to a portrait - documentary film

What is hidden behind the name written on the sign on "Vasil Urumov" street in
Plovdiv - European Capital of Culture 2019?...
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... Journalists, art and theater critics, of whom the artists of
Plovdiv painted a series of portraits in appreciation of their presentations... And who,
dismissed 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 a duty of entire collectives and institutions"...
Irresponsible communist repressions led to his early death.

Vasil Urumov lived from 1930 to 1979. Only after the changes in 1990, he was
awarded the "Plovdiv" Award for the collection of poems "Don't envy me". Since then,
a street has been named after him. As the researchers wrote: "The people of this city
felt that they owed something to the man... who was such a Plovdiv phenomenon that
if he did not exist we would have invented him... As our likeness and our antithesis..."
The creation of this film is part of the LEGACY 2023 program of PLOVDIV –
EUROPEAN CAPITAL OF CULTURE 2019. The project was realized by Director George
Kaitzanov in co-authorship with Svetlana Urumova.

The creative team shares:
Our film is a poetic essay... We tried to combine the rich collection of the family
archive with a mosaic of officially published memories of his contemporaries -
colleagues and friends, critics, and researchers. As masters of the pen, they manage to
convey emotionally from different angles their specific feelings from the meetings with
the poet. Masters of the Brush gave us the opportunity to illustrate the story with a
whole gallery of his portraits and to combine them with his lyrical pearls, scattered
throughout the periodicals, but collected here in one virtual volume of poetry. The
insightful performance of the poems by the actor Dimitar Selenski helps us to
experience the astonishment of his contemporaries at the discovery that Vasil Urumov
was more than a poet, journalist, and theater critic... In their imagination, he remains
that vital weirdo who proved that it is possible for a man to live freely, in an alternative
reality, unthinkable for them in the totalitarian atmosphere of the time...
Never in the role of a victim... "As happy as a stolen second..."