Thirst opens with a long shot of a road snaking its way up a hill towards the camera position. The credits appear to the left of the ‘Scope frame and in the distance a figure is running up the road towards us. I was immediately struck by resemblances to other films such as Zvyagintsev’s The Banishment or Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s Uzak which start in similar ways.
The running figure is a teenage boy who it later turns out has to run 4,000 steps each day to prevent the heart attacks suffered by his father who monitors the lad’s progress from his position up a tree (where he sneaks a crafty fag). When the boy stops he spots a young woman and an old man by the side of their truck. The fifth principal character is the boy’s mother who has moved into her father’s old house at the top of another hill. She earns the family’s money by washing the bed linen from hotels (presumably in the valley below). Each day a driver delivers soiled sheets and collects the washed and ironed replacements. The only problem is that there is a drought and each day the water supply is disrupted, making the washing business increasingly difficult to manage. But the girl and the old man are a water drilling outfit. She divines where the water is and he organises the drilling. Problem solved – or is it?
There is certainly a strong indication that this is an ‘elemental story’ with possible ecology issues as well as metaphorical meanings. Asked about ecological questions, the debutant director Svetla Tsotsorkova replied that she hadn’t thought too much about them. The story was actually inspired by her own family memories – her grandmother had washed sheets for hotels. Another question in the post-screening discussion was: “How does this film relate to Bulgarian cinema more generally?” Tsotsorkova replied that perhaps it did resemble films made in Bulgaria during the 1960s and into the 1980s. It has a timeless feel with little dialogue and unnamed characters. The two younger characters are played by non-actors and the older characters by veterans of Bulgarian cinema. Working with a much older male screenwriter, Tsotsorkova gradually refined the script and the film as screened runs 90 minutes.
The family on the hill has a settled but restricted life before the arrival of the father-daughter water drillers. They have different ‘thirsts’ for all kinds of things besides water to wash the sheets and their ‘Eden’ is eventually destroyed when they seek to quench those thirsts. The girl in particular is a fascinating character and her back story works well with an excellent performance to suggest an ancient story of disruption of the family unit. The LFF audience clearly enjoyed the film which works wonderfully as an aesthetic experience as well as a gripping tale. It’s a remarkable début film that will stay with me for a long time. Reading various interviews with the director after the screening I was intrigued to see that she name-checked Andrea Arnold as a filmmaker she admires and thinking about the connection I can see that though the films are very different, Arnold’s work on something like Wuthering Heights does share the same sense of people and places.
I hope this gets UK distribution. Properly handled there will be an audience for a film of this quality and I’d like to watch it again.
The Case for Global Film 