Art is the most universal language that allows us to understand, discover and recognize each nation. Through this language, for the second decade, the Bulgarian actress Jana Yakovleva has brought Bulgaria and Italy closer. The world opera achievements of names such as Raina Kabaivanska, Boris Christoff and Nikola Gyuzelev turned out to be an extremely good basis for such recognition. Even the Bulgarian Cultural Institute in Rome has been housed since 2006 in the house of the great opera bass Boris Christoff which is also home to the Bulgarian Academy of Arts and Culture Boris Christoff, which he founded. Every year dozens of Bulgarian scholars stay in it, embarking on the glorious path of opera. And Jana Yakovleva, as director of the Cultural Institute and daughter of the actor Yuri Yakovlev, continues to find a way to popularize the whole diversity of Bulgarian culture.

14 years ago, Jana Yakovleva laid the beginning of the Days of Bulgarian Cinema in the Eternal City, which later became part of the events organized by the Bulgarian Cultural Institute there. This year the film festival begins on July 9 and will last until July 11^th, in one of the most picturesque natural places in the heart of Rome - Villa Borghese.

"I am very happy that we will open the festival with a film, which, in terms of audience interest and viewing, is one of our most successful productions in the last 20 years - "The Naked Truth about the Zhiguli Band”. Many of the actors in the film will be our guests”, Jana explains. “I think that it is with comedy that the event should be opened in order to laugh, to smile, just when we take off our masks here in Italy. Then we will go through a small masterpiece - the animated film by Theodore Ushev and Georgi Gospodinov "The Physics of Sorrow". We will also see the incredible film by Kristina Grozeva and Petar Valchanov "Father" to complete the feature program with the film of the Chuchkov Brothers "18% gray". We will dedicate the third festival day to what we may rarely pay attention to - how you start to love. How you start to love physics, mathematics. The answers can be found in the documentary "Theo's Formula" with the main character Teodosii Teodosiev, who for the last 40 years has dedicated himself to the mission of creating talents in the field of physics and his students are medalists at all Olympiads in the world. We will end with a film that has a special place in our lives and that is “The Khan and the Empire”. A film that every Bulgarian in the 1980s had the opportunity to watch and felt proud of Bulgaria’s history”.

Jana believes that it is extremely important at a time like today – of limitations, fear and isolation - to think about how we will be able to open up to the world, to others, to our friends, so that we can continue to get to know each other.

"And we need to understand that we all have one thing inside us – souls and hearts with which we love, with which we rely and create art with which we can touch the other, even if they do not speak our language," she says.

Another step on this path for the director of the Bulgarian Cultural Institute in Rome is Gallery "Bulgaria" in the very heart of the Eternal City – behind the square "Navona", which was officially opened on May 26 by the President of Bulgaria Rumen Radev. The first exhibition presented works by Bulgarian authors, owned by private Italian collectors and art lovers, who were very pleased to present their paintings.

"For years I have dreamed of how Bulgarian culture could be seen somewhere on the central streets of Rome. Because the house of Boris Hristov, unfortunately, is located in a not very communicative place and this deprives us of a wider audience and people who are interested in Bulgaria in all its nuances. We managed to find the place in a tragicomic moment of a pandemic. From now on, this place will be a meeting place for exhibitions, a meeting place for conversations, a meeting place for presenting books and most of all – a showcase of Bulgaria. A place where everyone can come in to ask us their questions, to talk, to discover something about Bulgaria, about our history, about our culture, about our tourism. ”

For more than seven years, Jana Yakovleva has also organized the open-air cultural festival "Sofia Congratulates Rome" on the island of Tiberina, on the Tiber River in the Italian capital. Unfortunately, in recent years the event has been paused because the efforts of the Roman government were focused on holding events in large galleries and enclosed spaces.

"How strange is the irony of fate – now we all go back to those smaller forms, more intimate experiences. These spaces on the Tiber brought us just that - the pleasure of art under the starry sky of Rome.

Jana hopes the festival will soon be part of Rome's cultural programme again, and until then she and her team have created a beautiful stage under the stars, in the large courtyard of the Bulgarian Cultural Institute, where opera and classical concerts of Bulgarian singers will be organized.

English version Rositsa Petkova