King for a Day

The film tells the story of a poor man called Purko. He does everything he can to get out of poverty, but every attempt ends in failure. The state of society and of morals in Bulgaria in the thirties becomes visible at every door he knocks on. The film tells this not as a mournful picture but as comedy; what is laughed at is not the man but the arrangement that keeps him where he is. What is comic and what is bitter stand in the same scene, and the film leaves the viewer somewhere between the two. Todor Kolev plays the lead in Nikolay Volev’s eighty seven minute Bulgarian film, completed in 1983.