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Following Gregg Araki’s “I Want Your Sex” and Cathy Yan’s “The Gallerist,” which both premiered at this year’s Sundance Film Festival to mixed results, Geneviève Dulude-De Celles’ “Nina Roza” is the latest 2026 film to take a swipe at the absurdities of the contemporary art world. Though instead of relying on the scandalous machinations of satire, as the Sundance titles did, this one pivots to and later works in service of the meditative allure of grief and memory drama.
Shot and set between Canada and Bulgaria, it’s the follow-up to the Montreal-based director’s first fiction feature, “A Colony,” which won the Crystal Bear in 2019. Like that film and the rest of her oeuvre, her latest is another tender tale of a protagonist stuck between two worlds, a hallmark motif fitting for a director who splits her time between documentary and fiction filmmaking.
The film’s title reflects that “idea of the double,” featuring two women who seem enigmatically one and the same to the unmoored protagonist, art curator Mihail, played by Galin Stoev. One is an eight-year-old Bulgarian painting prodigy named Nina, alternately played by twins Sofia and Ekatarina Stanina; the other is Mihail’s daughter Roza (Michelle Tzontchev) who’s currently staying with him alongside her young son Thomas (Raphaël Fournier), after feeling adrift from the child’s father. Through the stark similarities and differences between the two women, “Nina Roza” finds an apt symbolism for Mihail’s past and present and search for belongingness, but it’s unfair to suggest that Dulude-De Celles merely renders both women as a cipher for the protagonist and the viewer.
Mihail has kept both worlds firmly separate for nearly three decades since living in permanent exile in Montreal with Roza after the demise of his Bulgarian wife, so much so that he has become a Sofian who “thinks in French.” When Roza plays her mom’s favorite music or insists on teaching her Quebec-born son to speak Bulgarian, it irritates him. The Balkan country is a “backward place,” he tells the curious boy. It’s no surprise, then, that upon learning about the viral paintings of a rural Bulgarian village girl, who has repurposed a livestock barn into a studio, he almost instantly assumes it’s a fraud. (Nina’s trending story, which sets the movie into motion, takes its cue from the real-life story of Australian child prodigy Aelita Andre.) Soon, Mihail travels to Bulgaria to confirm his seemingly logical assumption, only to discover answers he didn’t intend to seek and more questions about the double life he’s leading and his fractured relationship with Roza, who was the same age as Nina when they fled Bulgaria together.
Though the legitimacy of Nina’s abstract work (painted in real life by Montreal artist Aujeault) eventually snaps into focus, “Nina Roza” is much less drawn to solving the suspicion than to heightening the inescapable overlap between former and current lives, between dream and reality, in the context of grief and belated recollections, allowing for a hypnotic, plot-averse memory piece akin to many an Alice Rohrwacher movie. Other textures considered, Dulude-De Celles also fashions a film about exile and estrangement and sacrificing one’s identity in pursuit of self-preservation, about what a place can do to people.
Whereas the film anonymizes its Canadian setting, given it’s mostly presented through interior shots, cinematographer Alexandre Nour Desjardins shoots Bulgaria in a manner that feels at once poetic and purgatorial, and maximizes the scenic beauty of the countryside, with a camera that would rather move than keep still. The overall palette is subdued, steeped in vintage brown, which gives Dulude-De Celles’ present-day story a timeless quality. Sun-drenched shots of Mihail, often zoned out or half-asleep in transit, evoke an elusive inner world the director is trying to access and intimate, in much the same way as the film’s hazy moments, captured by an anamorphic lens, yield a transportive effect. There is a sense that the filmmaker is deliberately slowing down the central character’s experience of the present and therefore that of the audience.
Then there’s composer Joseph Marchand’s meaningful mix of a generally dreamlike score, alongside ‘70s Bulgarian estrada, featuring Pasha Hristova’s “Edna Bulgarska Roza” and “Povei Vetre,” and traditional Bulgarian folk music, like Petar Lyondev’s widely popular arrangement of “Ergen Deda,” which is much less concerned with ennobling the proceedings than it is with reflecting Mihail’s disassociation and forced contact with the specters of his past — one of the rare occasions where anachronistic needle drops actually elevate a film rather than kneecap it.
However, the film’s critique of the art world only decidedly crystallizes when Chiara Caselli’s Giulia, the Italian gallery owner representing Nina, shows up over an hour into the 104-minute movie. Recognizing that she can only play the prodigy card to sell Nina’s work for so long, Giulia claims to give the child’s mother an “excellent cause” to emigrate to Italy and practically forge a new life with her daughter in the foreign land. But when Mihail, feeling obliged to protect Nina, pries about the art dealer’s real motives and whether she actually cares about the young artist’s approval, Giulia merely couches her plan in terms of “helping them.” “Her mother came to me, not the other way around,” she asserts, pretending to be oblivious to the power dynamics between her and the women she claims to help.
The deceptively doting gallerist sees the girl as nothing but an investment, and all the predatory scheming is not lost on the precocious Nina, who’d rather prefer a pastoral life in the company of her friends and family, all artists themselves, to Italy’s Next Great Painter, thus rejecting the solitary artist mystique. Nina sort of hurls the question of authenticity back to the foreign tastemakers hot on her heels. In this respect, “Nina Roza” can certainly be read as a commentary on tokenism, forced migration, and commodity in the modern art industry. A montage near the coda shows logistics workers carefully handling, labeling, and transporting Nina’s paintings for the forthcoming exhibit thousands of miles away, and you begin to wonder whether gallerists, collectors, and curators value their artists the same way they value their works or the stories that brought forth such invaluable art. It’s an adequate critique, one that I do wish the languidly paced movie foregrounded a little bit more.
Stoev and the Stanina twins (whom I hardly notice as two separate actors, let alone twins) are basically brilliant; they act as if it’s not their first time sharing the screen together. Stoev’s expressively melancholic visage recalls that of the recently late Iranian legend Homayoun Ershadi in “Taste of Cherry.” The movie is at its most potent when it simply observes Stoev interfacing with the local villagers, most especially the unassumingly funny Nikolay Mutafchiev, who plays Nina’s uncle. Here and nowhere else, Mihail experiences the sacred bond of community, of what it means to primally connect with people, in hopes of learning to be gentle with oneself.
Like the eponymous gifted girl’s paintings, “Nina Roza” is subtly cosmic, compelling, and impressionistic. It powerfully commits to symbolic, time-shifting flourishes scattered throughout its swerving narrative. It is a work of legitimate form.
Grade: B+
“Nina Roza” premiered at the 2026 Berlin Film Festival. It is currently seeking U.S. distribution.
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