Film Review | "Nina Roza"  The Music of the Cosmos

Geneviève Dulude-De Celles’ film is a transatlantic dance of estrangement and the search for connection, subtly portraying a damaged father-daughter relationship, uprooting, and the question of what price past decisions demand in the present.

An easy-going summer party, women, men, children swirling around a garden. From the first moment, the viewer’s gaze is drawn to the ethereal young woman at the centre. Eventually she gets up from her chair and walks past the pool out of the frame as if in a trance.

Nina Roza’s hypnotic opening scene sets us up for a transatlantic dance of estrangement and searching for (re-)connection. Quebec director Geneviève Dulude-De Celles’ second feature, a Canadian-Bulgarian-Italian-Belgian co-production, is up for a Bear at the Berlinale 2026 amidst a slew of family and relationship stories in competition.

Where have you gone?

We are introduced to Roza, played by Michelle Tzontchev, who just walked out of the frame and her relationship. She asks to move back in with her curator father. Mihail, played by Gavon Stoev, originally from Bulgaria and emigrated to Canada decades ago, is busy setting up an art show and reluctantly takes in his daughter and her young son. Equally reluctantly, Mihail goes back to his country of origin for the first time since leaving, in search of an alleged child prodigy painter in a remote village. Forced to face a past he wanted to forget, Mikhail comes to measure the cost of his family’s uprooting on his damaged bond with his daughter. “I am not present anymore. — Where have you gone? — I wish I knew,” one exchange goes.

The past drives the present and the characters’ personal struggles in Dulude-De Celles’ subtle and well-crafted tale of liminal existence. The inventive and effective camera work, from point of view passages to sweeping pans to extreme and expressive close-ups of ears, eyes, hands, takes the audience on a odyssey of fractured identities and relationships, even through somewhat lengthy stretches in the middle. “I am interested first of all in the human being, whether in documentary or fiction; I want to look at our reality, faces in which we can recognize ourselves,” commented the director in an interview with Festival Scope. One beautiful scene shows Mihail staring at the empty white cube wall in the gallery. Bulgarian actor-theatre director Galin Stoev oozes tension even from behind. Cut to his house, crammed with things and sombre with lingering memories. The film’s design is steeped in earthy colours —browns, greens, yellows— throughout the Montreal interiors and the Bulgarian fields.
 

Curating Means Caring

Dulude-De Celles, who already has a Crystal Bear to her name for her 2019 debut coming-of-age film A Colony, takes a father-daughter story to ruminate on trust and loss, agency and making meaning of one’s life chapters. Art runs through it as a scaffolding metaphor. To curate, we learn, means “to take care”. Mihail just has to apply his professional energy and expertise to his family, the director seems to signal. Carried by a booming orchestral score, 1970s Bulgarian pop and traditional Balkan female vocals, —“the music of cosmos”— art and culture explore and express one’s soul.

It is intriguing when a younger female filmmaker chooses an older male perspective, a choice that connects Nina Roza to German competition title Home Stories by Eva Trobisch, another father-daughter narrative that delves into past decisions and present identity questions. Nina Roza is visually alluring, operating on an impressionistic and atmospheric level, including stretches without dialogue, and no details on the death of Roza’s Bulgarian mother. Big if suppressed emotions are undercurrents, perhaps most successfully swept to the surface in a powerfully tight and touching scene where Mihail walks into his long abandoned Bulgarian family’s dinner. It takes some dedication to stay vested in the more often than not difficult protagonist Mihail and his opaque demons. Some might find the film’s lyrical style promises more drama that the inner turmoil delivers. But if you let Nina Roza, it tells, or rather shows, a delicate story of loss and displacement, rearranging oneself and one’s relationships around new circumstances and contexts.

The one character actively shaping her life is the child prodigy Nina, more allegory or alter ego as the film’s double name and dual culture title Nina Roza insinuates, making bold, conscious decisions to protect her soul and integrity against external pressures to perform, commercialize or leave home. What could have been maudlin ends on a defiant and forward-looking note. “You’re a ghost, and I don’t believe in ghosts anymore.”
 

February 2026