FOLLOW ME is my first serious attempt to make a film. On a scorning summer night, Dad had received a permission to take me on his job – on the inner secure grounds at Burgas Airport. Imagine a 14-year-old boy thunderstruck by the roar of airplanes only meters away from the runway. It was me! I was fascinated by rhythm of cars, people, buses, trucks, planes and equipment moving in what seemed like a chaos on the surface and yet was a choreographed masterpiece. This was, I guess, a love at first with what would later grow into my fascination with complex systems, management and optimization problems.

FOLLOW ME runs for 15 minutes; it was shot with a hand-held camera and edited in my free time over summer break after 7-th grade. The sound editing work won me couple of awards, the most significant one at My Europe Film Contest, an E.U.-sponsored film festival in Germany where I was received a “special laudatory mention by the selection committee for remarkable and promising skills.” I was the only person of a young age at the festival and the accomplishment gave me the confidence to undertake my next film, Clouds Fly West, which riped even bigger success shooting me for a week on nation evening news and on whole pages of newspapers.

FOLLOW M was shot in 2008, the busiest summer of the airport, a decade after the enterprise had survived a near bankruptcy in the 1990-s. By 2008, Burgas Airport was Bulgaria’s busiest hub, a gateway for tourists and a NATO airbase, with 1.8 million passenger passing through its gates annually.