HRISTO / ХРИСТО

Hristo is a former homeless boy who managed to find a job and rent a place. He would do anything to get a normal living. Despite his hard work one day he gets fired and he is forced to go back to living on the streets. Time passes by in unsuccessfully trying to find a new job. Life gets tougher in the winter and he hits the limits of surviving. One night he almost kills a man in order to take his job. All goes well until at one point he faces a choice - to save the life of his friend, or lose his job again.

“Hristo is one of those wretched individuals whose bodies we sometimes see on the evening news, in the section “as for the rest of the news… ”The camera throws a careless look at the corpse with its worn-out shoes, then chastely lets the focus blur; all the better if the news anchor manages to change his expression in time, from sour indifference to concern – to him that is not a person, but something that lives nowhere and has nothing – a nobody from the faceless crowd. The Hristo project is a cinematic initiative to turn that “nothing” into a person. It is our attempt to pull the boy out of the crowd, almost at the last moment, by the collar. And, through a simple story, we hope that we can instill in the viewer’s consciousness that he exists. We would like to present 18-year-old Hristo to the esteemed audience as material (and more precisely – human) evidence that, at the beginning of the 21st century, in the city with its millions of inhabitants, there are some human beings who are fighting their battles for survival, who are gradually losing their human appearance, who are being slowly degraded as they live deprived of human sympathy, and who die in extreme loneliness.“

Grigor Lefterov, Todor Matsanov