Twice Upon a Time in the West, a Bulgarian thriller featuring Italian star Claudia Cardinale, is to have its first run at the Sofia Opera on Wednesday.

The movie by director and scriptwriter Boris Despodov (his first feature film after a dozen documentaries and shorts) will be shown in cinemas across in several towns and cities across Bulgaria starting October 9. These include Cinema House, Odeon, G8 Cinema and the French Cultural Institute (Sofia) and the chains of Cinema City in Sofia, Plovdiv, Ruse and Blagoevgrad.

Cardinale, who arrived in Sofia on Tuesday for the first screening, had a warm welcome at the airport, and after taking part in an evening show on private national bTV station had dinner at an Italian restaurant.

For the Italian legend, whose list of movies includes 140 titles, this is the first one where she appears as herself.

Both the story's plot and setting bear some resemblance to Sergio Leone's Wild West movies from the late 1960s and the 1970s - not in the form of plagiarism, but more as a tribute.  

Mila, a young woman fleeing her husband, finds herself in a ghostly town somewhere in the desert where she is hired by a woman (Cardinale) to run the household affairs. As the bonds between the two grow stronger, quite expected kinds of newcomers enter the story: a cowboy, an Indian, and a "bad guy", crossing the borders between fiction and reality.  

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