High
ranking secret policemen do not often get to present their own work at MoMA,
but Donio Donev did. His involvement in the Bulgarian domestic intelligence
service is an established fact now that his dossier has been released. However,
Donev’s films really aren’t his films. It was always an open secret Anton
Trayanov was the uncredited animator of beloved Bulgarian classics like The Three Fools, but Donev took all the
bows on the international festival circuit. Mina Mileva & Vesela Kazakova
set the record straight with Uncle Tony,
Three Fools, and the Secret Service (trailer here), which screens
during the AFI’s 2014 EU Film Showcase.
By
all accounts, Donev really was a clever and skillful caricaturist, but he
probably could not have animated a mouse if he shot 50,000 volts through it.
Most Bulgarian filmmakers, especially those working in animation, knew Trayanov
was the real artist responsible for some of the country’s best loved films.
They also understood why his name was not on any of them. Under Communism, all
of the film authority’s division heads and nearly all of the film directors
were secret service agents.
Eventually,
the understandably frustrated Trayanov was fired when he started complaining.
For three years he survived as a construction worker for a Japanese firm
building a luxury hotel in Sofia (lord knows why). He was lucky to get that
gig, considering he was blackballed at every other Bulgarian state industry.
Eventually, he started teaching animation at the National Academy Theater and
Film Arts, where Mileva took his courses, before he was sacked again under
murky circumstances.
Sadly,
little has changed since the fall of Communism. The apparatchiks still
jealously guard their power, but Trayanov might just get the last posthumous laugh.
Although he died shortly after filming wrapped, his documentary had a record
breaking theatrical run in Bulgaria. Not surprisingly, Donev’s family has
threatened legal action. More troubling (if not necessarily shocking), Mileva
and Kazakova have had they copyright protection revoked, award nominations
rescinded, and endured a campaign of physical and emotional harassment.
It
is easy to see why Uncle Tony et al
touched a nerve. It addresses head on the privileges and abuses of position
that have carried over from the Communist era. The case it makes on Trayanov’s
behalf (and against Donev) is not just convincing. It is pretty much
conclusive. In fact, there are a handful of scenes that are jaw-droppingly
damning, as when Dimitar Tomov, animation chair of the National Academy, tries
to convince Mileva Trayanov never taught the classes she enrolled in, through a
combination of double-talk and Orwellian Newspeak. It is nearly as surreal
watching an interviewer catch Donev in a telling contradiction during an archival
television report. You have to wonder what happened to that poor guy.
