Thirst

In this starkly beautiful and tragic drama, a teenage boy lives with his mother and father on a hill in rural Bulgaria. It’s summertime, and the countryside is in the grip of a crippling drought, which is particularly troubling as the family’s main income comes from doing the washing for nearby hotels. Enter an enigmatic teenage girl and her father. He drills wells, guided by her eerie ability to locate water beneath the ground. The mother is suspicious of the young woman’s dowsing, but, having no alternative, she commissions a well and the father and daughter set up camp on the family’s land. While mutual need draws these two small families together, the disparity between what each requires, buried deep as the groundwater, will pull them apart. Thirst’s story is straightforward, but rich with foreshadowing images. These are taciturn people, living together physically but psychologically isolated, and the story unfolds through details and things unsaid. Filmmaker Svetla Tsotsorkova immediately establishes a bewitching sense of place—a dusty road, row upon row of bedsheet ghosts pinned on a line in a hot summer breeze—and compels viewers to hold their breath as truth and trouble channel their way to the surface. —Laura Henneman