The Bulgarian Film Archive houses an amazing collection of communist-era films and ephemera. Like many public facilities in Bulgaria, the archive is under-resourced; salaries are covered, but little else is. Employees work in dim light and cold in order to conserve power.

The archive contains hundreds of posters advertising Russian, East German and international films, spanning the communist period. Some posters are templates, with a space for the name and times of the film to be added. The Russian and East German film posters tend to contain only text, no images. The archivist calculated that there were five Russian films for every non-Russian film shown in Bulgaria during the communist era.

The posters are all falling apart and there is neither money nor inclination to preserve them. The archivist’s job is to account for and document the posters but that is all she can do. The posters will one day turn to dust, and I suspect many people will be happy to forget them and the times they represent.