From Bulgaria with love – of the American West!
Filmmakers Biliana and Marina Grozdanova on “Eastern Western”
Henry’s Western Roundup
By Henry Parke
December 11, 2025
Eastern Western is a beautiful, inspiring immigrant story, but then, so are the lives of the sisters who made it, Biliana Grozdanova and Marina Grozdanova. Marina elaborates, “We’re from Bulgaria originally. We immigrated when we were very young with our parents, and we lived many, many different places, from Australia to Canada, Spain, and then we finally landed in the U.S. We're based in Brooklyn, New York.” Certainly, a journey that might help one appreciate the United States, but why the western part of the country? “The Western, I think was the perfect genre for us to start with because it's a genre in which you can talk a lot about those issues, specifically immigration and coming to new lands.”
Biliana says, “We grew up with the ‘90s Westerns. One of the first films I remember seeing was Dances with Wolves, by Kevin Costner. Then we discovered Clint Eastwood, then we started moving backwards to Sergio Leone and Redford. The Western has been an iconography in our creative process. And as Marina said, it's the perfect genre: to tell a story of coming to America in the Western is as old as cinema. And we found that throughout these films that we love so much, you don't really hear the immigrant's perspective. Specifically, the Eastern European journey to America was something that we wanted to tell, in this re-imagining of this man coming to America. The main character, Igor, he's from Bosnia and Herzegovina. So we kind of fused our two paths, from Bulgaria, from Bosnia, and made this imaginary tale.”
In the story, in the late 1800s, we find the recently widowed Igor (Igor Galijasevic), and his 2-year-old son Ivo (Leonardo Galijasevic), in a frozen Montana, trying to survive the winter on their farm, and to make a life for themselves in America. They befriend a horse breeder (Duncan Vezain) and his family and throw in together. The tale is told chronologically, with some abrupt forward leaps.
Henry Parke: In making this film, were there any particular filmmakers or films that were key references to you, that influenced you?
Marina Grozdanova: I would say no. I would say going into making this film, I specifically was not thinking of any films, only because when you enter a landscape such as Montana, the landscape itself is what inspires the basis of your story, and then the characters you bring into it. Maybe tangentially the cinematic practice of recent filmmaker Chloe Zhao (note: director of The Rider, Nomadland, Hamnet); she does a lot of non-actor films, and she started off by making non-actor Westerns. And perhaps that was in the back of our minds, but I would say that in making this particular movie, I would like to think that it came purely from our minds and our hearts.
Biliana Grozdanova: I echo what Marina says. We didn't set out to make a movie like any other, but deep down, my personal inspiration does come from Kevin Costner. It does come from Don Quixote, Miguel Cervantes, the first modern novel, Cormac McCarthy's All the Pretty Horses. Just as general inspiration of the myths of the West, I do think influences are in the aura of Eastern Western.
Henry Parke: Your style of filmmaking tends to be very naturalistic, not heavily plot-driven. I was wondering how you went about writing the screenplay.
Marina Grozdanova: To be perfectly honest, our screenplay was a very, I won't say short or rough, but it was an outline. We had a starting point. We had a midpoint; I would say the end point came after a few weeks of shooting. We did one test shoot, and then we did our first shoot in November of 2022. And in that time period, we had maybe half of the outline of the screenplay thought out. And as we did our first shoot, we made the story as we were getting to know our real characters, our non-actors. Igor and his real-life son are the protagonists of the film. And then we incorporated another real-life Montana family to be featured later on in the film. And so we really allowed the story to mold around them. Therefore, the screenplay started off as an outline, then it developed more in detail as we met new characters throughout the shoots.
Biliana Grozdanova: And to piggyback off of that, we fluctuate between documentary and fiction. We come from a documentary background, and we are really open to -- we say this a lot -- the magic of cinema, where you can write the best script. Of course we love scripted cinema, but always being open to improv and discovering new twists and turns for your story was something that we worked with.
Henry Parke: The first sequence that you shot were the things with Igor and his son alone?
Biliana Grozdanova: Yes. Well, actually the first day of filming was the grizzly bear. We thought, if we can get this top list, we'll be good to go.
Henry Parke: Oh my God! Traditionally in Hollywood, you do that scene last, in case your lead gets eaten by the bear.
Biliana Grozdanova: Exactly.
Henry Parke: So, you took a big chance there. Shooting a Western under any circumstances is a challenge, but some of the scenes shot in the snow must have been very challenging.
Leonardo Galijaseviv as Ivo
Biliana Grozdanova: It was. Winter was our probably hardest portion because of the cold. We were working with limited hours of daylight, and as you said, naturalistic is our style. We also don't really light any of our scenes and heavily rely on daylight and moving with the characters and flowing with the characters. So it was difficult. We were also working with kids and horses and animals, which they tell you not to do, because there are lot of factors there. But the elements in Montana very much dictate your shoot, as well as the baby. The young Evo in the film, Leonardo in real life, we were on his schedule. If he has a nap, we'll film the napping scene. If he's crying, we'll film the crying scene. That, plus winter in a tiny cold cabin, was rough. But I think that those winter images are some of my favorite images of the film.
[To be Continued]
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