The Goat Horn

The film is set in seventeenth-century Bulgaria under Ottoman rule. Four men break into the house of Karaivan the shepherd and kill his wife in front of their daughter. Karaivan takes the girl, Maria, up into the mountains and raises her as a boy, teaching her to fight, to hunt and to kill. Years later the two of them go after those four men together. But as Maria grows, she begins to want a life other than the one her father has given her. It is the most watched and most cited film in Bulgarian cinema. Metodi Andonov shows revenge not as satisfaction but as a weight eating the girl's life; the role her father assigns her leaves her no childhood at all. Katya Paskaleva's almost wordless performance is at the centre. The narrative moves through landscape, silence and the face rather than dialogue. The film has also been read in Bulgaria as a national text, and some historians keep their distance from that reading because it builds the Ottoman period as a single-sided picture of oppression.