Cat in the Wall | 2019 Warsaw International Film Festival Review

Walls of existence: Politics & Pettiness find a Way Through the Cracks of Everyday Life in Bulgarian Debut

Bulgarian duo Vesela Kazakova and Mina Mileva’s giddy fiction debut packs more than your typical feline-themed studio film. Set inside and outside a UK social housing unit and flavoured with a lot of Marxist terminology, Cat in the Wall catches Irina (Irina Atanasova), a corky immigrant single mother living with her son, Jojo (Orlin Asenov) and brother, Vlado (Angel Genov) in a vulnerable position. Her career as a Bulgarian architect is not enough to make ends meet, which is why she took up bartending. Similarly, her brother – once a hopeful history graduate – is forced to install TV antennas in the suburbs of Britain for 35 pounds a day. Even with such bleak career prospects, Irina still confidently keeps herself busy with architecture projects in hopes of getting by with them in the future.

As if the tension between Irina’s family and her neighbors didn’t already cause a great deal of stress, the apparently insignificant event of adopting a stray cat triggers an explosive reaction of racist and xenophobic backlash. Irina and her family grow attached to the cat despite being aware it might be someone else’s. Unsurprisingly, Irina comes home one night to witness some sort of hell unleashed: another family fighting with Vlado over the cat in front of their door – an intelligently constructed scene combining jauntiness and self­-aware dramatic exaggeration. Hate speech and xenophobia seem to be the perfect recipe for a frivolous scandal. Social commentary arises in all sorts of contexts, from Irina and her brother dissecting the meaning of the word “gentrification” to the woman’s frustration at their British neighbors living on welfare.

Kazakova and Mileva’s directing style revolves around the savvy deploying of a documentary perspective – handheld shots and well-choreographed scenes are at the core of this social dramedy. The filmmakers display great attention to detail and a certain craftsmanship for the real, something that presumably required a level of improvisation. Characters aren’t just some pawns that blindly deliver their lines and follow a storyline – instead, Kazakova and Mileva are not afraid of inserting moments of irrelevance into the story, building up the nuances of their characters in the process.

Cat in the Wall’s socialist chitchat and incisive realness delivers a powerful outlook inside two disparate worlds, where no one is just good or bad. Kazakova and Mileva’s film portrays a world of social inequalities and fear of the foreigner, but it finds enough room in its walls to be filled with bittersweet irony and playfulness.

Reviewed on October 17th at the 2019 Warsaw International Film Festival – Competition 1-2. 92 Mins. Part of the The Fipresci Warsaw Critics Project.

★★★½/☆☆☆☆☆