Warden of the Dead

The central theme of Ilian Simeonov's award winning drama is' the boy': a nameless orphan with telekinetic abilities who grew up in a cemetery and lives there still. He is friends with Angel, a former political prisoner and a make up artist, whose job it is to do up the corpses. The plot is set against the backdrop of unspecified warsome activity and begins with the death of Angel's archrival. Despite the fact that this archrival had brought him the gulag in former times, his death none the less causes Angel to lose his will to live. When 'the boy' then prophecies the death of a human being in 10 days' time Angel is sure that he is the human being in question and that he will die. That's when they meet Maria, apparently the daughter of Angel's archrival. However, 'the boy' realises that she is in fact Angel's daughter. But what now? While the army keeps on delivering more and more corpses to the cemetery every night, 'the boy' is left to decide whether or not to reveal what he knows. Simeonov spent 12 years working on his dark epos and while drawing strongly on magical realism his work is a harrowing metaphor for a war striken Balkan.