Krassimir Terziev​

1969, Dobrich, Bulgaria, lives in Sofia, Bulgaria

Battles of Troy, 2005

documentary video, PAL, color, stereo, 51’

The documentary video project Battles of Troy is a study on the internal economy of contemporary, globalized cinema production, critically and ironically tracing the economic and political interconnections in the film industry. In 2003, Warner Bros. started one of the most expensive motion picture productions ever made, the film Troy (2004). For the film, which was shot in the UK, Malta, and Mexico, Warner Bros. hired 300 Bulgarian athletes to be the core of the armies in the movie. The perfect soldiers—large, strong, muscular, “Mediterranean-looking” guys—were recruited from the Sports Academy in Sofia, the capital of Bulgaria. Battles of Troy presents the “making of” of the film Troy through the viewpoint of the extras: cheap labor, the lowest units in the production hierarchy of a film with a budget of $185 m. Battles of Troy is s centered on the experience of these Bulgarian men, who spent three months on the Mexican coastline, training and shooting the massive battle scenes of Troy, which were nevertheless nothing more than a backdrop to the “real” action performed by movie stars. Why did all these men decide to work on the project if in the final version it is impossible to even distinguish the silhouettes of their bodies, let alone their identities? By shifting its focus to the usually overlooked protagonists of background action, Battles of Troy tries to investigate the expectations, hopes, conflicts, and disappointments of those people whose silent bodies create the crowds we see in films.