‘Nina Roza’ review: A Bulgarian-Canadian art curator is drawn back to his roots in sombre drama

Dir/scr: Geneviève Dulude-De Celles. Canada/Italy/Bulgaria/ Belgium. 2026. 107mins

A poetic cogitation on art, exile, parenthood and legacy, diaspora drama Nina Roza wears its seriousness on its sleeve, stylistically speaking. The second fiction feature by Canadian writer-director Geneviève Dulude-De Celles, following two feature documentaries and her 2019 fiction debut A Colony, this sombre Berlin Competition title handles its themes with some grace, but its austere atmospherics are likely not sufficiently distinctive to propel it into a crowded art-house arena.

Its austere atmospherics are not sufficiently distinctive

The film opens with a young woman standing glumly apart at a family party – a striking image, but one that, beyond introducing the theme of isolation, doesn’t entirely reverberate through what follows. She is Roza, or Rose (Michelle Tzontchev), the adult daughter of Mihail (Galin Stoev) – a.k.a. Michel in Quebecois society – an art curator who moved to Montreal from Bulgaria years ago when Roza’s mother died. After falling out with the father of her young son, Roza temporarily moves back in with Mihail, and their differences emerge; she reproaches her father for not bringing her up to speak Bulgarian, or to be conscious of her heritage.

Haunted by memories of his late wife and, increasingly, of Roza’s childhood, Mihail has cut himself off from the old country – but soon reluctantly returns. Art collector Christian (Christophe Bégin) is intrigued by reports of Nina, an eight-year-old girl in rural Bulgaria, a supposed prodigy whose paintings have gone viral online; sophisticated, vividly-coloured abstractions inflected with folk art motifs, they are purportedly her depiction of “the music of the cosmos”. Christian is keen to buy the child’s work from high-powered Italian dealer Giulia (Chiara Caselli), but he wants to be sure that Nina is the real deal.

Dispatched to assess her, Mihail flies out to visit the village where Nina (played by twins Ekaterina and Sofia Stanina) is openly suspicious of him; she is also unimpressed by Giulia’s attempts to package her as a commodity, notably in a spuriously folkloric photoshoot. Meanwhile, Mihail’s return sparks dormant feelings about his own origins, and he is soon losing himself at a village dance, spiralling around a bonfire. He also visits his family, and gets a hostile response from the sister (Svetlana Yancheva) he has neglected for years. But getting to know Nina also makes him reassess his relationship to Roza – as signalled by the title, which could hardly lay out this central idea more openly.

There’s a lot at stake thematically – both in terms of heritage and identity, and of more specific art-market questions (the exploitation of young talent, the cult of authenticity). But the film’s ruminative tone and self-consciously moody stylistics make for an overall solemnity that is hard to engage with, not least because of the casting of eminent stage actor and director Stoev. This is his first big-screen part, but one that somewhat short-changes him; he is largely required to register furrowed-brow introspection, as Mihail wanders around chewing uncommunicatively on his unexpressed thoughts and feelings. (The role is very much that time-honoured Euro art-house staple, the Overcoated Male Intellectual).

Other cast members get the chance to be livelier, including a brittle Yancheva; Caselli, exuding bohemian-chic grandeur; and above all, the Stanina sisters, who exude a sometimes disconcerting sullenness bordering on ferocity. Stylistic effects – deep ochre filters, a cut from a spiral of paint on a pottery wheel to a snail’s shell, sound design cuts to engulfing silence – feel too deliberate, underlining seriousness of intent rather than feeling organic.