Montreal-based, Canadian director Geneviève Dulude-De Celles’s sophomore narrative feature Nina Roza revolves around Mihail (Galin Stoev), who hears about Nina (Ekatarina Stanina), an eight-year-old painting prodigy in their native Bulgaria. He’s sceptical that her prodigious talent is genuine, but an art collector who hires his services insists that he visit the young girl to investigate. This forces Mihail to return to the homeland he abandoned 30 years earlier in order to make a home in Canada, with his daughter Roza (Michelle Tzontchev), who he calls “Rose”. Mihail’s return to the place he swore he’d never set foot again becomes a surprising journey that might just bring him and Roza closer together.

Dulude-De Celles directed the documentaries Welcome to FL (, 2015) and Les Jours (2023). She made her narrative feature debut with 2018’s A Colony (une colonie), about a high school teenager trying to find her place in the world.

Nina Roza premiered in the Official Competition of the 76th Berlinale, where it won the Silver Bear for Best Screenplay. Click here in 0rder to read our exclusive review of the film.

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Paul Risker – What distinguishes the experience of a first from a second feature?

Geneviève Dulude-De Celles – Well, every project is so different and on my first feature, I had the feeling that I was learning a lot throughout the process. And even though Nina Roza was such a different experience, I still had this feeling.

My first feature was shot in Quebec and was mainly about teenagehood. It was filmed in a documentary aesthetic with a handheld camera, whereas this project was shot in Bulgaria, and in the Bulgarian language. We shot very differently with wide shots on reels, and I was working with both non-actors and established actors. I had a sense of having experience shooting my second feature, but I was still learning throughout the process.

PR – Identity appears to be one of the thematic cornerstones of your cinema. What motivates your interest in this theme?

GDC – I’m from Quebec and I grew up in a small village in the countryside. My parents were a little bit like outcasts in the community because they came from a big city, whereas all my friends, their parents and their family had lived there for generations. So, because of that, I’ve been seen as a stranger, even if I was white and I spoke the same language. I was positioned in a way where that was my community and I belong there, but people still saw me as a foreigner. That’s why I’m interested in this subject, because I can relate to this feeling on a smaller scale. Of course, it’s totally different for people that have experienced migration, but yes, that’s my personal link to identity.

I’m the type of person that naturally doubts and questions, and so, I’m always in the grey, which can lack stability and conviction. It’s interesting to portray identity in a fluid and layered way, where it’s not only one thing. For example, I hate being framed as only a white woman.

PR – How did you expand your exploration of the theme of identity in Nina Roza?

GDC – Well, it’s interesting because talking about my childhood, it was portrayed in my first feature film, A Colony. It was the question the film addressed, but when I’d finished the film, I wanted to create distance from my own experience and not put myself on the screen.

I have a lot of friends of second-generation migrants in Montreal, and one of them, a close friend, I’ve come to know well. Her father’s story fascinated me because he left Uruguay 40 years ago and at some point, he decided he would never go back. That means never seeing his mother or his sister again. This decision didn’t come from a traumatic experience; it was just that to conjugate his chosen new life in Canada with his past was more difficult than deciding to put the past to one side in order to move forward.

I was interested in his trajectory and what would happen if he was then obligated to go back? What ghosts would he see? How would he feel? That was the core of the movie, and I’d also spent time in Eastern Europe in my early twenties. I lived in Romania for six months and traveled around Bulgaria. Back then, I was working with migrants that were leaving Romania in order to go live in Canada. So, that makes me more sensitive to that subject, and while I was there as a foreign French speaker, I came to know the French-speaking community, the expats, more closely. I could relate to the Romanians that were about to leave out of necessity because my fellow expats and I were there for choice, and so this two-way migration inspired the complex relationship that Mihail has with the Italian galleries, for instance. A combination of all of this created Nina Roza’s baseline.

PR – The film offers an interesting perspective on our relationship with the spatial. We can remove ourselves from a physical space, but if we fail to resolve what we’re trying to escape, we’ll carry it with us. Nina Roza explores the idea that we don’t only occupy places physically but emotionally. Please comment!

GDC – Yes, just because you physically leave a place doesn’t mean you will emotionally leave. Mihail thought that by making the decision to leave they’d be able to cope with that, but if there are wounds and if what you’re sacrificing is not discussed, then it will stay with you. This is what happens to Mihail and also his daughter, because a child bears their parent’s wounds. Psychologists would agree, and so, it was a way to say that you have to take care and address those hidden and emotional wounds because they will stay with you, and at some point, they will come out.

PR – Not everything is explored and revealed in the film. For example, the relationship between Mihail and his daughter Rose or the circumstances of his wife’s death. Nina Roza is like a chapter in a broader story, and some of these ambiguities may be dealt with in later chapters of Mihail and his daughter’s story. Is this an accurate affirmation?

GDC – Through the daughter, I wanted to express the wounds and the silence of their past that her father doesn’t express. And his refusal leads to his daughter feeling these things. I remember speaking a lot with my second-generation migrant friends, who are in their 30s, and there’s, for instance, the feeling of not belonging or hiding something in relationships. In order for Rose to cope with feeling lost, she looks at the souvenir and the photo, which are her first gesture to try to find her bearings. But Mihail is closing the door, which leads to a fight and that then leads to his decision to go back to Bulgaria. It was important that at some point the character decides to go back because of his daughter, so the gesture comes more out of a feeling rather than it being a simple professional task.

PR – It’s impossible to discuss the film without mentioning its visual language, which complements the themes of connection and redemption.

GDC – I was really inspired by all the symbolists. When I was writing the script, I thought a lot about Fellini’s 8 ½ [1963], and Bertolucci’s The Conformist [1970]. So, films with a visceral language that convey symbolism. And there’s the duality, the mirroring. We see the Canadian identity in Mihail and the Bulgarian identity can be found in Roza and Nina. The idea of the double is in the film’s title, and visually we try to convey that and to explore Mihail’s inner feelings because his journey is charged with emotion and memories.

We used lenses that would give us a certain texture. Sometimes they were anamorphic, so the background would be blurrier, but we were lucky, because in Bulgaria the locations speak for themselves, and so, it was also nourishing for us.

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Geneviève Dulude-De Celles is pictured at the top of this interview. The other image is a still from Nina Roza.