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Elitza Gueorvieva, Bulgarian writer and director: "Coming to France was a space flight"

Elitza Georgieva.

© Personal archive of Elitza Gueorgieva.

Text by: Elena Gabrielian

10 mins

As a child, Elitza Georgieva wanted to become a cosmonaut.

But the fall of the Berlin Wall “shattered” this dream built by the state and made it possible to realize its own.

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At the age of 18, in search of freedom, the Bulgarian Elitza Georgieva arrived in France, where she became a writer and director.

It is French that she has chosen as the language of her creations.

In 20 years of living in France, she has learned to see the door behind every wall and has found in the foreign language “a silent place”.

Thanks to the French language, Elitza Guerogieva was able to reinvent herself, to be inspired and finally to find words to describe the dramas experienced, too painful to be told in her mother tongue.

RFI: How did you turn to art when you dreamed of becoming a cosmonaut?

Elitza Guerogieva:

Becoming a cosmonaut is part of a dream built by an entire era.

It was a very shared dream.

It was something that was imposed.

The school where I studied was called Yuri Gagarin.

There was his statue and in the yard, a fir tree he had planted.

From my first days of school, I heard stories about cosmonauts.

I bathed in it.

But this dream was even stronger for the generation of my parents who experienced Yuri Gagarin's flight into space.

The iron curtain that separated East from West blocked our trajectories, so we could only dream in that direction.

Becoming a cosmonaut corresponded more to a surge of freedom than to a real vocation.

When I started writing my first novel

, I had to imagine this child and his dream of being an cosmonaut.

It's a fictional tour, a way of entering history through a childhood dream.

In this novel, you combine the interior universe of childhood with the upheavals of great history and write in particular this sentence: " 

".

When and especially how did you start to distinguish between real and fake?

When I was making my first film

Outsiders, I was filming my grandfather speaking at a meeting of old communists.

I was fascinated by the fact that you could still see this political momentum in his eyes, when this communist utopia no longer existed in Bulgaria.

On the contrary, the Communists were very mocked.

The word communist had even become an insult when at the time, many people were members of the Communist Party without really having a choice.

Even 30 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, it is still a question that angers and divides society.

It's the question of origins, of the family where you come from, because at the time, if you were a communist, that meant that you were on the right side of history.

Was coming to France finally a path to freedom for you to find yourself on the right side of history?  

It was not a final decision.

For a very long time, I didn't know if I was going to stay there.

But unconsciously and almost intuitively, I followed this desire for freedom that my parents had when they dreamed of space.

For me, it became possible.

Our generation was the first to be able to come freely to France, enroll in university, find work.

I crossed this door which opened without really knowing what I was going to find there.

But deep down inside, it was this freedom that I was looking for.

When I arrived in France, I had the opportunity to compare what we were experiencing with another society.

To make my film

, I found three Bulgarian women from different generations who had arrived in France and sooner or later evoked communism.

So, it became our common point.

This junction between politics and the personal questioned me a lot.

I quickly realized that it was so strong that it changed our trajectories.

Out of 9 million Bulgarians, a third live abroad.

We build ourselves with this idea of ​​living elsewhere.

Did you experience this arrival in France as a feat equivalent to space travel?

Yes, but it was still easier, and I did it without training.

When at 18 you leave your native country and wander the streets when you no longer have any bearings and you have to reinvent yourself, thinking of yourself as an adult is a fairly important propulsion that shakes a lot .

Here, you also sought your freedom through writing, especially in a foreign language.

How has the French language helped you to emancipate yourself?

I've been living in France for almost 20 years and obviously I've read a lot in French, even more than in Bulgarian.

I already bathe in another imagination which allowed me to find another place to rethink the story.

It's a matter of distance.

Sometimes we need to step back to see things.

This is what happens when we think back to childhood or when we think back to a historical period that is too important to be fully digested in our country.

I have the impression of escaping in this way, thanks to another language which allows me to find this renewal of the gaze, perhaps a certain lightness.

I specify that I was 7 years old when the communist regime collapsed.

And even though the transition period lasted for decades, communism did not disappear from people's mentality.

If I had been in Bulgaria, it would have been very difficult to write about communism.

In France, there is a form of ignorance, and on my part a desire to tell this exceptional context in which I grew up.

I wanted to tell my loved ones in France how we build ourselves in this turbulent context when we are children, and how a political event can be important until it enters children's dreams, even in games.

What role did writing play in your resistance to this imposed dream?

For a foreigner, being able to express themselves is something very important, but it takes a lot of time.

When I arrived in France, I was deprived for a long time of the possibility of being myself in this other language.

Because mastering grammar is not enough;

I also had to be able to joke, as I like to do so much.

Being able to make humor in French took me a lot of time.

While I was searching for my words, it was never very funny.

I've always considered writing with humor, except that it took me 10 years to allow myself to write in French.

And as this dream of writing was difficult to achieve at first, I quickly turned to the cinema.

I told myself that by making images, I would have less to write.

Except that each film begins with a writing phase.

This cinematographic writing awakened the desire for literary writing. 

Can you write in your mother tongue and what does that mean to you? 

I always write in Bulgarian which remains a more immediate language.

I grew up in this language.

But today I take longer to switch from one language to another.

For example, when I go to Bulgaria, the first dreams I have are in French.

I do not see this situation in a dramatic way.

It's not a breakup.

Inevitably, over time, Bulgarian has become a bit foreign because I have this French imagination.

That's why I sometimes invent expressions in Bulgarian that only exist in French.

I'm always in a lag.

I feel like I'm in a special place, in another place. 

Precisely, you talk about it in your latest film 

 which shows the making of the first novel by the Belarusian writer Alyona Glukhova who, like you, left her mother tongue to write in French following a tragedy experienced by her family. , the mysterious disappearance of his father.

Your camera accompanies the writer in this process of writing and searching for words.

How did the idea of ​​making a film on what is so difficult to illustrate come about? 

It was a rather complicated bet, because it is not something immediately visual.

What allowed me to take a cinematographic look at his writing was this practice that we both shared.

We wrote our first novels in a foreign language and we faced the same problems of discrepancy that made our texts incomprehensible.

We went through this experience together.

It was a way of talking about what goes through us and creating a dialogue.

We had such strong experiences in our mother tongue that we needed perspective to talk about them, and the foreign language allows us to take this distance.

, it is precisely the place where this foreigner lives between several languages, between several countries.

We are strongly inhabited by the ability to reinvent ourselves in all these languages ​​that are part of us. 

Do you feel torn between East and West, between French and Bulgarian?

Do you have a feeling of frustration or are you more in harmony with this duality? 

Of course, this condition is accompanied by difficulties.

It has never been easy to be a foreigner.

I probably wouldn't have given the same answer 20 years ago, because I managed to make French my language and France my country.

A month ago, I obtained French nationality, while keeping my Bulgarian nationality.

It did something pretty strong to me to add a new identity.

It is a path that is not always easy.

When you come from Eastern Europe, especially when you are an 18-year-old young woman, we often hear stereotypes, clichés, and face ignorance.

It puts us in a fragile position, even if there are times when I manage to laugh about it.

You have to fight against that, including through writing. 

Does becoming French erase in you this feeling of being a foreigner? 

No, I do not think so.

I think I'm at the stage in my life where it won't budge.

I still have my Bulgarian culture and it is impossible to take away the first 18 years of my life.

Besides, I don't think my accent will go away either.

And that's not the goal.

I will always live with these two cultures.

I obviously see it as a richness even if I will always be a little in “this silent place”.

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