The sixteenth edition of the Sofia International Film Festival, one of the main film events in the Balkan region, is set to begin on Monday.

The feature film Ave of Bulgarian director Konstantin Bozhanov will be shown at the official opening of the festival scheduled for 7 pm EET in the Bulgarian capital's National Palace of Culture, Hall 1.

A total of 138 features, 39 documentaries and more than 80 shorts are included in the fest's program..

American director Jaffe Zinn's Magic Valley, Brazilian/French/Argentine co-production Stories Only Exist When Remembered and British movie Holy Flying Circus will be the main highlights of this year's film fest, according to The Hollywood Reporter.

Featured in Variety's Top 50 of cinema festivals, the event presents Bulgaria to the world as the host one of the important film festivals in Europe and takes place annually in March. Since 1997 more than 1,600 feature films and documentaries have been screened within the festival's framework.

Av?

Hitchhiking across Bulgaria to attend a friend's funeral, a college boy falls in with the title character, a 17-year-old runaway and compulsive liar. They share a boundless curiosity that causes them to make dumb mistakes, and director Konstantin Bojanov, working mainly in level-headed long takes, depicts their foolhardiness neither romantically nor pathetically. This quiet road movie derives its strongest effects from the diverse terrain: as the characters travel from cities to plains to the Balkan foothills, Bulgaria comes to seem like a wide canvas on which they're painting themselves.