The documentary "Les petits fantГґmes de Bulgarie" (The Little Phantoms of Bulgaria) of the French channel France 2 has been watched by over 4,5 million people in France, Italy and Switzerland.
This is the second documentary about abandoned children in Bulgaria to horrify a large international audience.
The authors uncover living conditions at a home for disabled children in the Sliven's village of Medven and focus on the attitudes towards these children.
"Bulgaria, the poorest country in Europe, holds a sad record - the number of children who live institutionalized", the film's opening line states.
The French documentary has been initially filmed in November with the use of a hidden camera because the home's Director had a policy to not allow any media representatives inside. The faces of the people working at the home are dimmed so that they would not be recognized.
"Post-Communist Bulgaria has kept the best and the worse, such as Bistra, one extremely active director who had managed to create a little humanitarian island from her institution. Its tiny residents have been lucky and it shows. Several months after their arrival, some children suffering from rachitis, begin to grow", the authors further say.
According to the authors what the children were lacking the most was attention. Deprived of love and stimulation the children have been dying without really being noticed.
The documentary's most disturbing moment comes when the village's gravedigger tells where the death children from the home have been buried. While talking he throws himself on the ground holding his face in his hands, remembering the horror of seeing a dog tearing a child's dead body into pieces.
The same gravedigger from Medven, Hristo Tsonchev, however, had made statements Tuesday before several media refuting ever seeing a dog tear a child's body apart, adding that when he had told the French reporters the story he had been drunk and forced to come up with something.
Some of Tsonchev's fellow villagers imply that he wanted revenge against the home for firing his daughter in law from her cleaning job. They also say that the nurses and the nursing aides often take the children from the home to the village's store to buy them candy and other things.
The mayor of Medven had shown a BGNES reporter the death certificates for all children who have passed away in the village in the last 10 years. 10 of them are for children from the home. At the moment the home houses 50 children and has 50 employees, but 10 of them have recently received dismissal notices.
The documentary also shows footage from a press conference dedicated to issues related to such homes, where participants include the Minister of Labor and Social Policy Emilia Maslarova, Justice Minister Miglena Tacheva and the European Minister Gergana Gruncharova.
At the press-conference conclusion the French reporter asks Maslarova what was she attributing the high dead toll in Medven and she replies: " I do not have nay information about high dead toll...this French journalist had overheard something about a high dead toll...there is dead everywhere, including hospitals."
"Maslarova left for Sofia and promised a new home. The country, however, does not need money in this sector, what it needs is qualified people", says the French reporter.
Last year BBC broadcasted another documentary dedicated to abandoned children in Bulgaria. The author of "Bulgaria's Abandoned Children" had filmed for over nine months at the home for children with mental and physical disabilities in the village of Mogilino near the city of Ruse.
The documentary was met with widespread controversy in Bulgaria while the film was shown in the European Parliament provoking a three-hours long discussion.
It has been announced earlier this year that the home in Mogilino will be closed. Recently the Social Ministry informed that by the end of May 16 children have been taken out of the home and have been placed at other special facilities. There are plans for 5 more children to be placed by the end of the year at a home in Varna to be raised in family-like conditions.
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