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MILA MIKHAILOVA IN SOFIA'S LAST AMBULANCE

No prompt response in Sofia

Young Bulgarian-born, German-resident Ilian Metev, who's 22, made this film chronicling a corner of Sofia's degraded ambulance system by mounting three cameras on the dashboard of one of the city's rickety old emergency vehicles and then editing together material gathered over the course of two years. Mostly we do not get to see the victims and must rely on dialogue. A little girl is injured and the nurse, rather charmingly, asks her questions and talks and talks to keep her mind off it as they rumble over two hundred potholes on the way to the hospital. A drunk run over on the highway with a broken leg keeps trying to get up as the nurse ties on a splint and patiently orders him, over and over, to lie still till they arrive and carry him in. One place they arrive where neighrors have called he patient is not only dead, but her head half eaten away by worms. It is good we do not see. Mostly, nothing works. Yes, this is no competition for the dryly ironic nightmare of Cristi Puiu's Romanian feature, the Cannes 2005 Un Certain Regard prize winner, The Death of Mr. Lazarescu, (NYFF 2005) but it makes a sort of companion piece further illustrating the nature of Eastern Block medical meltdowns. And the humanity of the endeavor and the trio of ambulance staffers is unquestionable. They come off well, given the pressures, though they show little sympathy for an aborted abortion, nor full understanding of how drug addiction works. But then, neither is really their job, which is to keep people alive on the way to the hospital, if they can get to them in time, or at all, which often they cannot. Its documentary realism will make this of interest, but for a great film, watch Dr. Lazarescu.

Are we jaded by endless American TV series about disasters and police, or films like Scorsese's dramatic Bringing Out the Dead? Or is this not the best way to compile information about what after all involves a lot of running around, when it focuses mainly on sitting in the front of an ambulance, chewing the fat, chewing gum, and smoking cigarettes? Anyway, Sofia's Last Ambulance is really about not being able to find the place, not being able to get through to headquarters, arriving too late. Other ambulances -- this isn't quite the last one -- break down. People are quitting. "There's nobody left," Krassi (Krassimir Yordanov), the male technician, says. There are two others on camera, the patient, good-natured driver, Plamen Slavkov, and the nurse practitioner, Mila Mikhailova.

There are just 13 ambulances for two million people, the film's blurb says, but we get no view of the other dozen. Poor Mila, Plamen, and Krassi seem to live in their own slow frustrating bumpy little world. Of which, due to the filmmaker's remote shooting method, we get too little a view much of the time. A health care professional reviewing the film was disappointed the injuries and treatment methods and tools were never shown.

Sofia's Last Ambulance/Poslednata lineika na Sofia, 80 mins., debuted at Cannes in 2012, where it won a new youth prize, the France 4 Prix Révélation, at Critics Week, and it has shown at easily a dozen and a half other festivals since. It is part of the documentary feature competition of the San Francisco International Film Festival, April 25-May 9, 2013, where it was screened for this review.

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©Chris Knipp. Blog: http://chrisknipp.blogspot.com/.