📅 ON THIS DAY IN BULGARIA, Friday 18 September
If you have ever sat through a Bulgarian film evening and watched everyone in the room mouth the lines along with the screen, there is a reasonable chance the man on screen was Rousy Chanev. He was born on this date in 1945, and he has been in the national memory since before most of the people quoting him were born.
What happened on this day
Rusi Ivanov Chanev was born on 18 September 1945 in Burgas. He trained in acting at the VITIZ academy in Sofia under professor Boyan Danovski, finishing in 1967, and then did what actors of his generation did: he worked, in theatres, for decades. The Masalitinov drama theatre in Plovdiv, the National Youth Theatre, the Sofia Drama Theatre from 1970 to 1990, then Zad Kanala and Theatre 199. He played Hamlet in 1982.
The screen work is what travelled. He had been filming since 1965, but the role that fixed him was the Cockerel in "Advantage" (Авантаж) in 1977, a part that won him a special acting prize at Varna the following year. The film itself went to the 28th Berlin International Film Festival and took the Silver Bear for Best Director, which went to Georgi Dyulgerov, the director Chanev worked with most fruitfully. Then "Damned Souls" (1975), "Blood Remains" (1980), "Measure for Measure" (1981), and "Time of Violence" (Време разделно) in 1988, which is about as close as Bulgarian cinema gets to a film everyone has seen.
He has kept going. He was the voice behind the documentary series The Century of Bulgaria at the turn of the millennium, he has published two books with Mladen Mladenov, he took the Order of Saints Cyril and Methodius, first class, in 2021, and in 2025 Burgas made him an honorary citizen of the municipality, eighty years after it produced him.
Why this matters for British expats
Bulgarian cinema is the bit of the culture that stays hardest to get into from outside, partly because so little of it is subtitled well and partly because the reference points are assumed rather than explained. Chanev is one of those reference points. Mention "Време разделно" to almost any Bulgarian over forty and you will get a reaction, usually a strong one, because the film deals with the forced conversion of Bulgarians to Islam under Ottoman rule and it has never stopped being argued about.
The practical version: if you want one way into the conversation that is not football or politics, this is it. The films are findable, several of them carry English subtitles, and our guide to television and entertainment here covers where to look. And if you spend time down on the Burgas coast, you are in the city that raised him and has finally, at ninety, said so out loud.
Sources and further reading
The training under Danovski, the theatre years, the award list and the Burgas honour all come from the Bulgarian Wikipedia entry on Rousy Chanev; the English entry is much thinner but supplies the Berlin festival detail and the count of around thirty films.