Time of Violence

In the seventeenth century a Christian Bulgarian region in the Rhodope mountains is chosen by the Ottoman administration as the district to be converted to Islam as an example. The man assigned to the task is a janissary taken from that same village years before, and he finds his own past standing in front of him. The pasha governing the region wants the matter finished without bloodshed, but as the resistance holds, coercion, torture and revolt follow one another. Ludmil Staikov’s two hundred and eighty eight minute Bulgarian film, made in two parts, was adapted from Anton Donchev’s novel and shown in Un Certain Regard at Cannes in 1988. It sold more than five million tickets in Bulgaria; but in those same years the state was carrying out a campaign of forced assimilation against its Turkish and Pomak minority, and the film has been criticised for serving that campaign’s propaganda.