Sissy Denkova estimates there are 50 Bulgarians in Memphis, and they all know one another. “We’re always together,” she says. “The reason we crossed paths here is because we just happen to be here and we’re sort of involuntary friends.”
Denkova emigrated with her family from Bulgaria in 1997 at the age of 10. By chance, her family ended up in Memphis, where her father searched through the phonebook for Bulgarian names, inviting whomever he could to create a Bulgarian pocket, a feeling of home, in a foreign country. “Everybody is on their immigrant journey,” Denkova says. “And we’re experiencing it together because we’re sticking together. And that lends itself to some comedy, some interesting situations, personalities, and journeys that you wouldn’t otherwise encounter. If we lived in Bulgaria, would we be friends?”
It’s this awareness of comedy in the immigrant experience that Denkova underscores in her directorial debut, Scent of Linden. “I wanted to make a movie about that sense of ambiguity because you’ve got one foot in one sense of home and you’ve got the other in this new sense of home,” says Denkova. “But I made it through the lens of my growing up in America within a Bulgarian community. This is the most authentic thing that I have to talk about now. It’s like a rite of passage. You cannot move to the next place or the next subject until you talk about the subject. And that’s the case for me.”
Yet Scent of Linden isn’t Denkova’s story, exactly, in that it isn’t told from the point of view of a young girl coming to America. Instead, the film, set in Memphis, follows Stefan (Ivan Barnev) on his immigrant journey, guided by a small community of Bulgarians, chief among them being Georgi (Toncho Tokmakchiev) and Dima (Albena Koleva), who host Stefan and help him get on his feet. “The whole cast is of age,” says Denkova, “because when you are in that stage of life, everything is more dire. Everything is more at stake. … They’re all-encompassing of many immigrants that I’ve seen and know because the stories and experiences really overlap.”
Stefan struggles to find a job; we see him drip sweat in an ice cream truck. He’s middle-aged, his mother is dying back home, and he flirts awkwardly. He is, put simply, extraordinarily ordinary, his life neither exceedingly successful nor terribly tragic. That’s where the authenticity lies for Denkova. “There’s the comedy and the tragedy [of life],” she says. “The comedy and the drama constantly depend on one another. The way to talk about something painful, for me, is with a sense of humor. And since it’s my first movie, I felt like I had a lot of creative liberty to kind of do what I wanted to do.”
Denkova used her creative liberty to insist her first film be acted in the Bulgarian language by Bulgarian actors. “As a debut filmmaker, I’m trying to not only talk about the most authentic subject to me, but I’m trying to make sure that I’m not doing things for the wrong reasons,” she says. “I felt that asking these Bulgarian actors to constantly speak in English as if it was everyday life, it’s not authentic, that’s not what we do. You’re recreating life as if it’s happening for the first time right in front of you even though it’s a film.”
The film feels wholesome, but not wholesome in the vein of tales that prescribe a moral code. It’s a kind of wholesome where the undeniably flawed characters are inherently endearing, where themes of forgiveness and found family tug at your emotions, as your heart sits on the edge of your seat with you.
Scent of Linden is believed to be the first Bulgarian feature film produced entirely in the U.S. After premiering at the Sofia International Film Festival and making its American debut at Cinequest in San Jose, California, the film opens this weekend in more than 60 theaters in Bulgaria.
It’s a big weekend for Denkova, who will be flying back from Bulgaria on Saturday for Scent of Linden‘s Sunday screening at Indie Memphis. “This film was made with a lot of love,” Denokova says, “because there’s a bigger purpose that is outside of me. I would never have made this if it was about me because that wouldn’t have gotten me through all the hard times. This belongs to all those other people who will know these feelings.”
Scent of Linden screens Sunday, October 29 at Playhouse on the Square as part of the Indie Memphis Film Festival. Purchase tickets at indiememphis.org/imff23.