Elitza Gueorguieva

Elitza Gueorguieva (1982, Bulgaria) lives near Paris, where she devotes herself to documentary filmmaking, literature, and its performance on stage. Her accent, fluctuating between remarkable gentleness and southern intonations — particularly on the words content and Pantin — impregnates her writing. She is the author of Odyssée des filles de l’Est (“Odyssey of Girls from the East”) and Les Cosmonautes ne font que passer (“The Cosmonauts are Just Passing Through”, Éditions Verticales, 2016 and 2024), as well as other texts. She directed the films Chaque mur est une porte (“Every Wall is a Door”, Cinéma du réel, 2017) and Notre endroit silencieux (“Our Silent Place”, Visions du réel, 2021), produced by Les Films du Bilboquet. In addition, she presents comic musical readings and lectures in which she exhibits stray images and words.

Her residency project is devoted to writing her next novel, which is partly inspired by her interview for French naturalization. At that interview, the Préfecture employee had given her a week to provide a certificate of attendance at work. Instead of complying, Elitza Gueorguieva immersed herself in the archives of a port city, where she discovered traces of a certain R.M., whose naturalization application had been rejected in 1939. This discovery will provide material for a tragicomic text structured around a central question: what is a “useful woman”?