Destination Skopje-Gabrovo is a 20 minute experimental drama in two episodes, the first one directed by Tea Begovska and the second one directed by producer/dramaturg Ivanka Apostolova Baskar. The film is closely inspired by Moscow-Petushki, by Soviet dissident writer Venedikt Yerofeyev. Yerofeyev was a brilliant and learned but dysfunctional drunkard who spent his life as a vagrant outsider in Soviet Russia. His writings, penned by a brilliant mind while in an alcoholic stupor, create comedy and pathos out of the complete absurdity and hopelessness of life in a totalitarian state. His works are celebrated as a brave attempt to make a meaningful artistic response to a hopeless, meaningless existence.
Kiril Doncov portrays a Yerofeyev-like figure. He has been directed to overact the character in an absurdly clownish caricature of drunkenness. We hear his monolog as a voice-over as he stumbles from waiting on a bench for a bus that never comes to sitting in an abandoned tram car, going nowhere.
Yerofeyev’s writing is sometimes considered “untranslatable” because its main pleasure is the density of its layers of cross-references to classical Russian literature and culture, mixed up with Soviet reality. The allusive quality of his writing isn’t included in Episode One, in which Donochov’s monolog is simply a portrait of a mopey alcoholic, philosophizing and brimming with resentment at the world, all while by blaming others for his weaknesses. The bus stop, in front of a construction site, fits quite well with Yerofeyev’s tone of bleak ugliness
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In episode two, Doncov speaks his monolog aloud. His ramblings reminded me of monologs I have heard from street people in New York: you can tell there is a brilliant mind at work, but very disordered, and it can be fascinating. The directors effectively set this monolog in a variety of settings around an empty, decaying train yard, in front of as well as inside the cars. The setting provides a sense of neglect and stasis. The text here has more of Yerofeyev’s allusive quality, with fantastic references to a “canaanite” cocktail and a “geneva” cocktail, which could be taken as references to the bible and to European, capitalist power. He also obsesses over a “star of bethlehem” cocktail which he asserts can make a person “spiritual enough” to endure all the humiliation of his vagrant life: obviously something that Yerofeyev would find desirable.
In 2022, in a world where many countries are heading towards totalitarianism, it is chilling to think that we all could be plunging, soon enough, into this kind of hopeless, meaningless existence, if we don’t rise up and put a stop to it collectively. Destination Skopje Gabrovo provides Western viewers a valuable chance to become acquainted with a writer they likely have been unaware of, with a message which feels uncomfortably relevant.
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