With this web site we open the door to a space where we will discuss the history of Bulgarian cinema. However, it will be seen not so much as a collection of themes and subjects, individual styles and artistic tendencies, but as a common denominator and unifying element for the overall culture of the nation. We focus on one particular time span: the period between the two world wars of the twentieth century. For our purposes, we consider it locked not between the beginning and the end of wars, but between two agreements of deep political significance: The Treaty of Neuilly and the Vienna Protocol of Bulgaria's accession into the Axis Tripartite Pact.

These are a little more than two decades during which cinema has become a truly popular pastime, it has embraced all social strata, educational and age groups. Almost all significant Bulgarian intellectuals and artists, authors and creators found a form to express their attitude towards him. Many of them are avid moviegoers, influenced by his ideas and ways of seeing reality.

In its accessibility and compelling comprehensiveness, cinema in the 1920s and 1930s is what the Internet is for the first two decades of the 21st century. It is perceived as synonymous with progress, a magical tool for entertainment, communication and knowledge, but also as a threat to established moral norms. At the same time, it is gradually becoming a lucrative industry: quite definitely for exhibition, distribution and film services, almost never for the field of production and for the film makers specifically.

Our focus is on the emergence of Bulgarian film culture, understood not so much as a complex of artistic ideas, the result of deliberate creativity, but as a social phenomenon, as practices of consumption and reception, for the formation of audiences and viewing preferences, for the mutual exchange of influences between cinema and other arts. In many ways these processes have a more lasting effect on the status of particular art in the public sphere than purely artistic facts. Of course, a series of other political and social factors determined the enormous popularity of cinema in Bulgarian society in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s, but one of the most important is still the legacy of that cultural significance, shaped and developed in the decades between the two world wars.