Ina Sotirova talks about her trip to Jamaica, smelly mangoes and cinema

published on 9/28/25 3:25 PM

Photo: Personal Archive

There are no accurate statistics on the number of Bulgarians living on Jamaica. However, to prove that it's impossible to find a place in the world without at least one Bulgarian, we talk to film director Ina Sotirova, who has lived on the island for ten years and holds both Bulgarian and Jamaican citizenship. She moved to Kingston, the capital, for a year to accompany her mother, who started working for the World Bank in the city.

'I wanted to see what life was like in Jamaica,' she says. 'By the end of the year, I was offered a teaching job with young people from the ghettos, as well as the opportunity to work on a documentary series. The training was about video and film, but I had to teach screenwriting,' she recalls. Despite her knowledge of cinematography, documentary filmmaking and journalism, she had never written a script herself. She had to quickly catch up, reading as much as she could in the two weeks she had to prepare. 'The first year was a test, but thanks to the many other courses I took, I learned more about writing and editing screenplays.'

Ina is not afraid to try new things. Born into a diplomatic family, she has lived all over the world since the age of 12. She has studied in the UK, the US and Canada.

It was while she was living in Barcelona that she was inspired to become a photojournalist — a passion she had held since childhood. This is how Ina met her first mentor in photojournalism, but her dream of becoming a reporter for National Geographic never materialised.

She took a step aside then and returned to cinema, her first foray into the field being as a student in New York.

"At that time, I made several short films, and my thesis was a film I titled Freedom 2 Dance. We screened it in Bulgaria in 2012. The plot reflects certain laws in New York that made dancing in establishments illegal in the City That Never Sleeps from 1926 to 2017.'

Ina's latest cinematic success is the short film Stinky Mango, which received multiple award nominations at the Diversity in Cannes event, winning the award for Best Cast. The film also won an award for innovative storytelling at the 'Films that Move' festival in Jamaica.

'The stinky mango is a metaphor for what happens inside us when we are unable to process our feelings and instead ignore them, pretending they don't exist. They begin to decay and make us ill. This is the backstory of my feature film, Mango Magic, which is still in development. It shows how to deal with our emotions and explores the power of each one."

The film focuses on men's emotions and the stereotype that 'men never cry'.

'I see how difficult it is for my father and the other men in my life to admit to themselves what is going on inside them. In my opinion, this stems from their upbringing rather than from human nature itself, because we are all born with the ability to process these emotions. In Stinky Mango, the protagonists repeatedly say that big men don't cry or feel pain and sadness, and that they must be strong. When I looked at the statistics, I found that men commit suicide much more often than women everywhere in the world. There is no country where men are not 4–20 times more likely to commit suicide, not to mention their propensity for domestic violence. That is why the film's message is 'Feel to heal', our compatriot concludes.