Yesterday

Yesterday (1988)

Вчера

The 1960s was the time of Beatles and Rolling Stones, the time of sexual revolution. These events have their echo in Bulgarian English-learning school. The school order provokes a protest of the students due to the narrow-minded teachers.

Date of release
1988-01-25
TMDB
7.9 / 10 (18)
Runtime
1h 20m
Genres
Drama
Director
Ivan Andonov

Casting

Interesting facts

  • Based on: Yesterday

Yesterday is a 1988 Bulgarian drama film directed by Ivan Andonov and based on Vlado Daverov's semi-autobiographical novel of the same name. It stars Hristo Shopov, Sofiya Kuzeva and Georgi Staykov as students at a boarding school in Lovech in the late 1960s.

Production

The film's script is based on Vlado Daverov's semi-autobiographical novel Yesterday. In his novel, Daverov describes school life at the Ernst Telmann German High School in Lovech. He was expelled from the school for chopping up a wooden desk in order to light a stove and keep his girlfriend warm. This scene was recreated in the film.

Director Vasil Zhivkov came up with the initial idea for a film adaptation of Yesterday, which Daverov accepted. The script was approved by Boyana Film's cinematographic collective; however, Zhivkov and Daverov got into an argument, after which the head of the collective offered Ivan Andonov to become the film's new director.

Andonov cast some of his personal favourite actors in the roles of the school staff: Georgi Rusev was cast as Principal Tzonchev, and Nadia Todorova as a cleaner. Andonov was impressed by director Nikola Rudarov's cameo appearance as the cameraman in the 1968 film One Shooting Day, and cast him in the role of the math teacher, Professor Baramov.

For the roles of the students, Andonov conducted screen tests with many students from the National Academy for Theatre and Film Arts, as well as other students from Sofia. Petar Popyordanov was initially cast as a background character, mainly because of his bad speech; however, due to his improvisations, his character eventually became one of the main characters. Georgi Staykov was the first young actor to join the cast.

The role of Ivan's father was given to the Boris Lukanov, an actor at the Ivan Vazov National Theatre. The scene, in which he explains to his son why he was fired from the position of editor-in-chief at the magazine he worked for, was cut during editing, as it did not correspond to Andonov's creative vision. This is the only scene filmed outside the school grounds.

Read on Wikipedia · Text from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. Data from Wikidata.

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