Wild projects do not frighten Maria Bakalova. The classically trained Bulgarian actress gained international fame and an Oscar nomination for her performance in 2020's "Borat Subsequent Moviefilm," followed it with a role in the daring "Bodies Bodies Bodies" and can be seen this year in Ali Abbasi's newsworthy "The Apprentice."
But her wildest project yet might be "Triumph," a dark comedy about psychics and space aliens in Bulgaria that is her home country's selection for the Best International Feature Film Oscar this year.
Bakalova joined the film's directors Kristina Grozeva and Petar Valchanov to discuss the "crazy, unbelievable, but absolutely true" new film with Steve Pond as part of TheWrap Screening Series.
Set in the early 1990s, right after the fall of the Berlin Wall, "Triumph" dramatizes a real-life attempt by the Bulgarian army to unearth an alien capsule from under a field, an artifact that will bring great virtue to the country's government. And mankind. Bakalova plays a young woman who claims to have psychic abilities, which will assist in discovering the extraterrestrial goodies.
The actress said that the film's plot, though set three decades ago and touched by the ludicrous, resonates within our world today.
"I've always been curious to find a reason why [psychic hotlines] are so strongly important for Bulgarian people, for people from Eastern Europe," she said in the clip from the conversation (above).
She opined that the popularity of psychics, even among leaders and politicians, could be explained by centuries of disappointment with the status quo.
"When people have such a long history, you develop a mindset where you become more suspicious about how things are gonna turn," she said. "So you try to find hope and something to hold onto. And even if that's a psychic, even if that's something that you can recognize as otherworldly, you want to find a hope in something. You want to believe in something."
Noting that the movie features archival news footage of Bulgaria's lurch back to Communism after the fall of the Soviet Union, she added, "When you're scared of making a decision, when you're scared to take a step further, take a leap of faith and believe in something new, you go back to old habits. Even [embracing] things that you wish to get rid of, just because it feels more secure and because you're scared of what the future is going to give you."
And this is where alien hunting by telepathic mediums suddenly strikes a chord. "That's why having somebody like a psychic," she said, "gives a reason why these people might go through some sort of a madness. And apparently, not only in my country. This is happening all over the world. I think that's important to say, is that this is a story that makes sense far outside Bulgaria."