Балони, хвърчила и писма (по френскокитайските следи на един български киноплакат)
Balloons, Kites and Letters (following the tracks of a Bulgarian poster of a French-Chinese film)

Summary/Abstract: The Cinema Poster Fund of the Bulgarian National Film Archive (BNFA) has very interesting holdings for research. The biggest hoard of artefacts is from the socialist era. It keeps many unknowns and ‘tells’ new facts about the development of the art of film posters in Bulgaria, shedding light on film distribution in this country. Poster and film are popular arts largely connected to each other. The paper is focused on a single poster, advertising the French-Chinese children’s movie A Letter from the End of the World. Actually, this is the Bulgarian title of the co-production. The original one is Le Cerf-volant du bout du monde / Chinese 风筝 / or The Magic of the Kite, 1958, 82; color). This was the first ever Chinese-French film cooperation, directed by Roger Pigaut and Wang Jiayi`s (王家乙), France having the major financial participation. For the purposes of the study, an interdisciplinary toolkit of film studies and Chinese studies is applied, merged with the case studies method. The paper seeks to answer some of the questions that we are concerned with: What was behind this co-production and how did it happen to come to Bulgaria? How was China presented to European children’s audiences, and to Bulgarian, in particular, in the relevant historical period? What was the reception of the film in different countries: China, France, and Bulgaria? What were the contexts of its making and what precisely was its cinematic destiny. How was Chinese cultural identity articulated through the language of cinema? Did the film’s title blaze a trail in the history of the art of motion pictures?

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