These are not simply films; these are the six pillars of Islam; stories that not only show us what it is like to be under its spell; but how to make it beautifully.

Just like ships, and relations need to be attached to the bottom using a weight to resist the forces striving to move them. But if in films the tragic events are the perfect anchor chain, in real life things are screwed up not so easily and beautifully. And accordingly, they do not create a grand setting for your love.

How can we turn love into something that is worth telling? Because the more interesting it is, the less we will want it to end.

First is the desire for love; the desire to feel uncomfortable. So it doesn’t suit you and to make your life difficult. Once the doctors had to operate me and the boy I was seeing back then, did not accompany me to the hospital. In the morning, when I had just made my first steps, holding a bag of bodily fluids, and walking from the ER into the foyer which was spinning around me, there, on the hottest seats in the whole world, only my mother was waiting for me.

Fuck the moral dilemma here, but that boy had missed the perfect opportunity for a beautiful setting and I had to ditch him right away. I looked around and saw another boy and girl – he was carrying her in his arms and she was holding the results from the medical tests between her teeth. This picture kept haunting me and with time became the irrefutable proof that love exists.

Unfortunately, dramatizing truly in love is an art that not everybody excels at. What one needs are pain, imagination, nerves and a sense of rhythm to distinguish the stages of the relationship. And when necessary, to strengthen them by a reliable and secretively agreed upon silence. You need wisdom to know that love is not Cirque du Soleil; and kindness not to mind.

Of course, scenography and topography of love are not to be underestimated, too. A light bulb, covered with a red blouse or a night, spent on the roof, create a completely different experience from a designer lamp and an overnight stay in a five-star hotel.

Yet, one of the most important things lest your love come to the surface is to never give up. To want to be a friend. And to love as if a billion people are watching you and love at the same time with you.

ALaska (2015)

Nadine: Tell me something about yourself… Something normal.
Fausto: I don’t know.
Nadine: Okay, I’ll go first then.

Fausto and Nadine meet for the first time on a hotel balcony in Paris. And in the first ten minutes they teach us an unforgettable lesson: in order to be hit by that fragile chance and to meet someone, first you have to be fed up with something else. Before they can even go on a date, Fausto goes to jail. Nadine won’t visit him while he is behind bars, but she will keep her promise not to forget him. And although both of them will do their best to hurt each other, love will return to the threshold of their tolerance as an abandoned and annoying pooch.

Notice the scenography of love: the café, the curb, the pool, the crutch, the table in the kitchen.

Big Love (2012)

Emily: What are our sweet dreams?
Maciek: Dreams lead to disappointment. So we have no dreams.

It is a story about two people who cannot be together nor live without each other. Maciek is an unfulfilled musician and an employee of a pharmaceutical company. Emily – brought up without a father and longing for a mentor in her life. It is one of those love stories that is printed on the street asphalt and in the indigo of the sky. A non-stop roller coaster around the city and the curve of relationships. Psychologists call it toxic because of the darkness that stains the loving man into a violator. The focus here is not on Maciek but upon Emily and the levels of her love for him. As in Escher’s lithography, the architecture of love is irrational and moves on an endless and upside down ladder. The lesson is for the neophiles – all those who are ready to screw love in the name of something new.

Panama (2015)

Jovan: Why do you keep lying to me?
Maja: You’re gone crazy. I knew you’d twist everything.

Jovan starts seeing Maja very casually. Little by little the mysterious and unobtrusive behaviour of the girl consumes his thoughts. It is that Jovan who lives in each of us: he searches for clues in his girlfriend’s profile, small but terrible ghosts from her parallel life. When I attended the première of Panama at the Odeon cinema in Sofia, the director Pavle Vuckovic admitted that the plot is inspired by his personal experience. He said that in each of us breathes such a dark and awful room. But while obsession here is the main theme, Maja’s behaviour is what we need to learn from. The ability to trust without proof. And to be lighter than hydrogen in love.

Love (2015)

Murphy: Secrets make you stronger.
Electra: No. Secrets make you darker.

Murphy is an American who lives in Paris. He’s fallen head over heels in love with the unstable Electra. Without even the faintest idea of the consequences for their relationship, one day they invite a neighbour in their bed. And here is the red room of abstinence from someone else, and the conversations, and the labyrinth – so important for this type of relationship. Here is the saturated and poisonous like mercury abyss of the unattainable, which you had once possessed. This breed of love is not for amateurs. It is for professionals. It is noir. An infinite and painful penetration. Pure-bred and difficult to achieve. But whoever succeeds in achieving it becomes a creator.

Rust and Bone (2012)

Alain van Versch: Do you want to fuck?
Stéphanie: Huh?
Alain van Versch: You want to know if it still works? So, let’s fuck!
Stéphanie: Just like that?
Alain van Versch: Yeah!

A casual acquaintance at the bar can sometimes turn into connective tissue even for the tiniest pieces of our broken world. And an accident – into the most important cog of the love system. Each one of you have asked yourselves: “Would he/she love me so much if I weighed twenty kilos more or was without an arm?” This film is the greatest textbook on anatomy and love muscles. A handbook on how to turn the relationship fractures into retaining walls and a crushing your heart epic about the misunderstood power of perfection. In Alain and Stephanie’s bond even jealousy is ridiculous, because true devotion is like a centipede and runs a thousand times faster than it. Simple and without many words. Strong in its fragile places, it carries you in its arms through everything and seeks for you without shame.

Irreversible (2002)

Alex: I’ve been reading the most amazing book.
Marcus: So what is it?
Alex: It says that the future is already written.

The events over the course of a fateful night in Paris unfold in reverse chronological order after the beautiful Alex is brutally raped and beaten in a blood-red underpass. Her boyfriend and her ex-lover take the law in their own hands and follow the violator’s trail into a bar called “Rectum”. The film rocks us back and forth between the genius triviality of love and the blissful ignorance of causal relationships. It tosses us from one end of the ring to the other and assures us that intentions are everything and nothing. It teaches us that on the surface of daily life love can take a completely different colour than that three metres down. And that without the test of the circumstances we may never understand the difference. Along with these lessons Irreversible focuses our attention on every step we take, punishing the violator in us even before he has committed the crime. And it brings out a cruel, indisputable and yet wonderful for NOT BELIEVING truth:

TIME
DESTROYS
EVERYTHING.