Sofia's Last Ambulance - Life on the front-line in Bulgaria

Sofia's Last Ambulance is a documentary following one of the city's very few ambulances, one with a worrying lack of suspension.  It is interesting enough, mainly because the crew, particularly Mila, were such engaging and undeniably characters facing an endless affront to their patience with humour, good grace and compassion.  The characters also shone clearly through because although a documentary. it was shot and cut like a character-led art house type film, rather than one with talking heads interspersed with real life footage.  The vast majority of shots were still cameras from the dashboard focusing on a single person for an extended period, frequently through a fog of cigarette smoke, so you got to see the full gamut of their emotions for each episode.  We never see a patient, just how these heroic people deal with what's thrown their way on shift.

However, this style also brought about my biggest issue with the film - the frustrating lack of context.  Although each individual episode engaged, there was no real sense of timescale, (was this a typical 24 hours or much longer time?), of the wider issues of the health service or of modern Bulgaria.  Interesting as the crew were, isolating their story from its wider world felt like we were only get a small part of the story and it did them a disservice.  It also seemed that pretty much every story chosen was one which showed the world at it's most testing or desperate, but with no context or variety, the impact is less.

It is still a rewarding film,  because of the strength of the characters and the reserves they find to deal with the situations they come across.  I was very happy to spend time with Mila, Krassi and Plamen.  And the fixed camera being thrown about in the ambulance as it races through the city was as visceral as many car chases in action films. Many of the episodes had their own individual tension and suspense and the unpredictability of many scenes had the real human feeling to them that are brought out so much better by documentary than fiction. But something that told me a bit more about the wider situation, that put these characters and their trials in context, could have made it so much more fulfilling and interesting.