The Mosquito Problem and Other Stories by Andrey Paounov

Young Bulgarian director Andrey Paounov seems to have a weakness for insects. Another peccadillo of his stories. If Giorgi and the Butterflies captured the foolish dreams of the director of a male psychiatric wing, his second documentary, The Mosquito Problem and Other Stories, explores the tragic-comic sanitary crisis of Belene, a township of some 9000 souls along the banks the Danube. In reality, even if the mosquitos constantly occupy the screen - although they are cunningly invisible - other more important threats hang over the town. Past or future, totalitarian or nuclear, they leave the odour of suffering and the opacity of the heavy clouds of insecticide in the air.

How to approach the mosquito problem infesting Belene, and eventually ‘liquidate’ it ? Falsely innocuous, this is the recurrent question which Andrey Paounov poses to his subjects. One after the other, facing the camera, almost each one of them responds, sometimes with weapons - a fly swatter or the less classic vacuum cleaner and hunting rifle ( !) - in hand. From the hunters at the Punata tavern to the cheerleaders, from Boyko, the photographer-historian of the town, to the pianist-composer Todor, via the only Cuban survivor amongst the communist ex-workers of an abandoned nuclear centre : Fernando Diaz or even Ivan and Petar, the two fishermen and ‘beckettian’ companions, everyone has their own little turn or anecdote.

The central question of the mosquitoes is however just a pretext. Little by little, Andrey succeeds in uncovering the ‘real’ problems of Belene. Even if the “zanzare” are a veritable plague, the traumatisms left by the communist era are revealed as the true local gangrene, of which the meaningful silences are a persisting symptom. The island of Persin still bears the undeniable scar : the old communist concentration camp, which was in operation between 1949 and 1959. A black hole in the middle of a swamp. Even if the horror has disappeared, there are still the vipers which hiss there. Deceased in October 2005, Julia Ruzhgeva was a guard in the camp. During her trial for multiple pre-meditated murders, from which Andrey Paounov borrows a few minutes of unbearable archive footage, she denied everything, insisting she had done nothing. To not remember. In the opening sequence of The Mosquito Problem… her own daughter meditates by the still nameless grave of a mother who was perhaps a “monster”. In the epilogue, her tears are effaced by the innocence of children’s laughter in Belene. The final dotted line of an overwhelmingly beautiful film.

Emilie Padellec