‘The Last Seagull’ Explores an Over-the-Hill Escort’s Passion for Life and Love in a Bulgarian Beach Town

variety.com:

Christopher Vourlias When he began working on his latest documentary, “The Last Seagull,” acclaimed Bulgarian filmmaker Tonislav Hristov (“The Good Postman”) set himself a seemingly simple task: to follow the last of the dying breed of male escorts who, since the communist era, have spent their summers seducing foreign women in resort towns along the Black Sea.

That plan went astray, however, when real-world events intervened: first the coronavirus pandemic, which grounded flights and shuttered the very resorts where those escorts plied their trade; then the war in Ukraine, which impacted “The Last Seagull” in unexpected ways. “This is what’s nice, but also scary, about documentaries,” Hristov told Variety after the film’s world premiere at the Thessaloniki Intl.

Documentary Festival. “You never know what’s going to happen next.” “The Last Seagull” is the director’s eighth documentary feature, following films such as Sundance and Berlinale selection “The Magic Life of V” (2019) and “The Good Postman,” which premiered at the International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam (IDFA) in 2016, before playing at Sundance.

It was while making that film, which Variety’s Guy Lodge described as “a sad, searing and profoundly empathetic study of electoral process in a minute Bulgarian village split by opposing responses to the Syrian refugee crisis,” that Hristov met the protagonist of “The Last Seagull,” one of the 40 or so residents of the hamlet where “The Good Postman” is set.