FOLLOW ME is my first attempt to make a film. On a scorching summer night in 2006, Dad took me to his job at the inner secure grounds of Burgas Airport and I was in awe. Imagine a 14-year-old boy hear the roar of airplanes just feet away from the runway. I was fascinated by the symphony of cars, people, buses, trucks, planes and equipment moving in what seemed like a chaos but was a directed masterpiece. I was in love at first with what would later grow into a fascination with the inner workings of complex systems.
FOLLOW ME is a 15-minute film which shows Burgas Airport in the summer of 2006, the busiest in the history of the airport, a decade after the enterprise escaped a near bankruptcy in the 1990s. Burgas Airport was then Bulgaria’s busiest hub, a gateway for tourists to to the Black Sea and a NATO airbase serving 1.8 million passengers annually.
I shot the film with a hand-held camera and edited it in Adobe Premiere the summer before I started high school, 8th grade. The sound editing work won me couple of awards, the most significant one at My Europe Film Contest, an E.U.-sponsored film festival in Germany where I was received a “special laudatory mention by the selection committee for remarkable and promising skills.” I was the only person of a young age at the festival and the accomplishment gave me the confidence to undertake my next film, Clouds Fly West.