By: Robert St. Martin
Los Angeles, CA (The Hollywood Times) 5/7/2024 – Director Nadjda Koseva’s film The Trap (2024, Bulgaria) screened as part of the annual SEEfest Film Festival on Saturday at UCLA James Bridges Auditorium and will screen again at the Laemmle Royal Theatre on Tuesday.
The film is a fairly simple morality tale about an older Bulgarian man named Yovo who lives in harmony in nature on the banks of the Danube. Yovo has a special understanding of nature and animals, including his two domesticated crows, a wolf that he keeps in a special cage in his yard, and his beloved dog which accompanies him on all his activities. He lives alone after the death of his wife in his small house along the Danube and opposite an island in the middle of the river which is known as Wolf Island.
We first see Yovo on Wolf Island, where he is picking up plastic bottles and trash from visitors to this deserted island. Suddenly, we see and hear a helicopter transporting a huge wild boat to the island where, it being drugged, is placed in a fenced enclosure. Soon we learn that the boar was brought there for a foreign big-game hunter to hunt.
However, as Yovo knows, it is not hunting season and it is obvious that there is huge bribe behind this arrangement for hunting the wild boar by the foreigner. It turns out that he is a big investor in a proposed dump for highly radioactive nuclear waste near the village.
Yovo, played by Alexandr Tirffonov, is a mesmerizing figure throughout the film. His bearded face and piercing blue eyes dominate the screen in close-ups, as he is most at home with animals and close to nature. Yovo frequently visits Wolf Island (which has not had any wolves in 100 years) and there, he cleans up after humans leave debris.
With the arrival of the wild boar, Yovo knows what is going on with this planned hunt. The wild board turns out to be bigger and wilder than expected and kills the hunting dogs of the men who have arranged the hunt.
They bring it to the attention of the village mayor and to the power player in the village – Yavor (Mikhail Stovanov) who lives in a fine architect-designed home of a man of wealth. Yovo knows all about Yavor’s past connections and corrupt practices. It turns out that Yavor’s grandfather as a Communist boss did in Yovo’s father for his dissenting views and arranged to have Yovo’s father killed.
The hunt for the wild boar needs a first-rate hunting dog and the only one around is Yovo’s own dog, which is a one-man dog loyal only to Yovo. So Yavor tries to find a way to get Yovo to join the hunt with his dog.
However, Yovo has his own ideas about the wild boar and the hunt. At night, he secretly takes food to the boar as he wonders what he can do to cause the hunt to fail and foil the plans for the nuclear waste disposal site.
The authorities try to get Yovo to cooperate and threaten to revoke the papers of a refuge Ukrainian single-mother Elena (Yanitsa Atasasova) and her young son, who seek refuge with Yovo in his house. All this leads up to Yovo’s final actions that speak louder than any words – as he figures out how to spoil the planned hunt by the foreigner for the wild boar, but a a price.
Koseva has directed a number of short films including The Ritua and Omelet, the latter awarded Special Mention at the Sundance Film Festival in 2009. Her debut feature was Irina (2018), the story of a part-time waitress who has an accident and needs to make money to provide for her family so she becomes a surrogate mother.
Clearly The Trap marks a different direction but stands out as an inspiring morality tale about good vs. evil where the bad guys are truly bad and closeness to nature is the sign of what is good. We are left to ponder what it means for humans to try to entrap the forces of nature for sinister and evil purposes.
