– BERLINALE 2026: Bulgarian filmmaker Ralitza Petrova’s sophomore feature embarks on a spiritual quest, triggered by loss and aided by a homecoming
Snejanka Mihaylova in Lust
After probing the absence of God in people’s souls as the cause of monstrous deeds in Godless [+see also:
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film profile], her debut feature, which won the Golden Leopard at Locarno in 2016, Bulgarian filmmaker Ralitza Petrova continues to gaze from the lowlands of human frailties towards the possibilities of spiritual elevation, this time through the father-daughter relationship in her second film, Lust, currently showing in the Berlinale Forum. Bearing in mind Freud’s theory, which considers the paternal figure as a projection of God, but not necessarily in the sense attributed by religion, one can easily interpret Lust as a continuation of this search for the divine, which strengthens the bonds with the world around us but also with the inner self.
The father-daughter relationship in Lust is only figurative, since he is dead, and she – the film’s protagonist, Lilian (Snejanka Mihaylova) – has seen him just once in her life. She now arrives in her native Bulgaria from across the ocean to deal with his mortal remains and what might have been an inheritance, but in reality, Lilian finds herself burdened with his debts, which she feels determined to rid herself of as soon as possible. Nevertheless, the act of rummaging through the sordid secrets of her estranged progenitor ends up forcing her to confront herself, and so does his dilapidated flat in the melancholy homeland she abandoned – a homeland she perhaps fled to escape her own traumas, numbing them via the deeper wounds of others while working as a psychologist in a prison for serious offenders. Slightly and almost imperceptibly, her actions also take on a figurative aspect, shifting what unfolds on screen from the material to the metaphysical.
Though it assumes the shape of a physical homecoming, Lust is rather an inward journey – a characteristic that explains its strong symbolism and sensitive cinematography, smoothly handled by DoP Julian Atanassov, whose camera, without imposing itself, intuitively grasps the internal fluctuations of Lilian’s state of mind, but also captures the ephemeral texture of emotional voids that might never be filled. The optics capture her cold-blooded manner of inhabiting space and, at the same time, her orphaned presence within the lifeless, threadbare interiors – a US prison, a Sofia hotel and her father’s deserted home. Her actions, guided by a logic that’s not immediately graspable, are framed by Bach’s cathartic “St Matthew Passion” at the beginning and the end, intertwined with the recurring image of a thick snake – an age-old symbol of sexuality – appearing in reality and in dreams as a reminder of repressed desire, and culminating in a shibari bondage, presented less as eroticism than as therapy. Having lost the ability to pray, like most modern people, a practice rooted in an old samurai torture technique proves more capable of jolting Lilian back into her body and her sense of self than futile attempts to reach a God whose essence has long been forgotten, or to extinguish the resounding absence of the father figure that continues to echo.
Shibari sounds exotic, both in sexual and aesthetic terms, and it is very possible that audiences and future festival programmers will be attracted by Lust not for its spiritual layer, but rather for what it is questioning: the instant pleasure and the drive of lust itself. Petrova’s film is rather an invitation to encounter something more ephemeral – a desire to connect and establish a bond with a liquid world, and with one’s own internal, vague origins and identities, as well as to embrace this visceral solitude we are all born into, which otherwise seeps through the film, freezing all that it comes into contact with.
Lust was produced by Bulgaria’s Aporia Filmworks and Screening Emotions, in co-production with Sweden’s Film i Väst and Silver Films, and Denmark’s Snowglobe. Its world sales are handled by Inwave Films.
