The Film Project “Share (!) Yourself” 2020

From Script to Structure: The Film Project “Share (!) Yourself”

In 2020 the screenplay competition organised by “The Palace / The Palace of the Happy People” gathered nearly one hundred texts from across Bulgaria. What began as a typical selection process quickly turned into an intensive reading marathon. Producer Dimitar Gochev and Dr. Peter Ayolov carefully examined every submission — not simply evaluating technical correctness, but searching for cinematic potential: the possibility that a text could become a film rather than remain literature.

Several works received awards, including “You Are Beautiful” by Hari Spasov, “Sanatorium” by Michaela-Sidera Scott and the first prize winner “Your Life Is Your Life” by Preslava Tsvetanova. Yet the jury distinguished one project differently. Instead of awarding it only as a script, they recognised it as the Best Film Project — “Share (!) Yourself” by Vladimir Davchev.

The distinction mattered. The prize acknowledged not a finished screenplay but a cinematic idea requiring development. The screenplay was written at the time after the Covid-19 lockdowns, when isolation stopped being a private eccentricity and became a shared social condition. Davchev’s story draws directly on that atmosphere, turning the enforced solitude of the period into a psychological structure and a cinematic world.

Peter Ayolov, lecturer in Media Scriptwriting at Sofia University and author of The Media Scenario (2026), approached the project as an exploration of narrative perception rather than plot mechanics. His involvement focused on shaping the mirrored structure so the film would be experienced as a psychological process instead of a conventional storyline.

From Evaluation to Collaboration

After the competition the process did not end. Ayolov began working directly with Davchev to transform the project from a promising text into a functional screenplay. The focus shifted from judging to construction.

The original script contained a strong conceptual core but followed a relatively linear dramatic logic. During development the work moved toward a different principle: structure as experience rather than sequence. Instead of scenes arranged chronologically, the narrative began to operate through mirrored situations, recurring perspectives and emotional echoes. The viewer would gradually assemble the story rather than passively receive it.

Ayolov approached the screenplay as a media scriptwriting problem — how to design perception. The goal was not simply to tell events but to organise attention.

Building a Unique Structure

The collaboration concentrated on three major transformations.

First, the protagonist’s arc stopped functioning as a continuous biography. The character appeared through fragments — conversations, memories, reactions of other characters — allowing identity to emerge indirectly. The film would not explain the person; it would let the audience reconstruct them.

Second, the narrative timeline was reorganised into a circular structure. Events were not placed before or after each other but around a central emotional question. Scenes repeated in altered contexts, producing meaning through variation rather than exposition.

Third, dialogue shifted from information to interpretation. Characters discussed actions whose full meaning was revealed only later. Speech therefore became part of the dramatic mechanism rather than commentary on it.

Through these changes the screenplay moved away from literary narration and toward cinematic perception. The script no longer described a story — it generated viewing.

A Script as Viewing Experience

What distinguished “Share (!) Yourself” was its attempt to make structure visible. The spectator would gradually realise that each scene redefined previous ones. The film unfolded less like a line and more like a constellation.

Ayolov’s work on the project followed a simple principle: cinema is not what happens but how the viewer understands what happens. Therefore structure had to guide interpretation without explaining it directly.

The development process involved repeated rewriting, rearranging and testing of scene order. Instead of asking whether a moment was clear, the team asked whether it produced curiosity. The narrative was designed so that comprehension would arrive slightly after perception — the viewer always discovering meaning one step later.

Beyond the Competition

The screenplay competition thus became a starting point rather than a conclusion. By awarding the project as Best Film Project, the organisers recognised a potential cinematic form still in formation. The collaboration that followed transformed a promising idea into a carefully engineered narrative system.

The case illustrates how script development can function as dialogue. The writer provides material; the dramaturg helps organise its perception. In this partnership the screenplay becomes less a finished document and more a working model of the future film.

“Share (!) Yourself” emerged from this process as a project built not on plot complexity but on structural design — a film intended to be assembled in the viewer’s mind. The competition discovered it, but the development shaped it into cinema.

Two Apartments, One Consciousness: An Analysis of the Screenplay “Share (!) Yourself” by Vladimir Davchev

The screenplay is built around a deceptively simple premise: two neighbours live in identical apartments in the centre of Sofia — a young man and an old man. They never truly meet, yet the film gradually reveals that their separation is uncertain. The narrative is not organised as an interaction between characters but as a dialogue between states of existence. What appears at first to be parallel lives slowly becomes a psychological continuity.

The film’s structure relies on mirroring. The building itself contains “mirror apartments”, and this spatial duplication becomes the organising principle of the dramaturgy. Objects repeat: clocks, balconies, music, alcohol, cigarettes, routines, solitary rituals. The viewer initially interprets these repetitions as coincidence, then as thematic echo, and finally as identity. The screenplay therefore moves from realism to metaphysical interpretation without changing its visual vocabulary.

The young man’s storyline begins with erasure. He sells possessions, removes objects associated with social life and disconnects from communication. The mobile phone rings constantly yet remains unanswered. Technology — normally a symbol of connection — becomes noise. He exchanges modern devices for analogue ones: a film camera replaces the digital world. The act is not nostalgic but existential. He does not want memory storage; he wants perception.

At the centre of his behaviour stands the green hanger. The object is insignificant in practical terms but enormous symbolically. It functions as a substitute presence — an interlocutor, witness and stabilising structure. The young man speaks to it, photographs it, carries it into the city. It becomes the minimal form of relationship: presence without response. The screenplay carefully shows that the character does not want communication but the illusion of communication without unpredictability.

His monologues reveal a philosophy of controlled solitude. He rejects shared language because understanding eventually collapses into difference. The hanger becomes the ideal partner precisely because it cannot contradict him. The film therefore explores a paradox: loneliness is painful, but real otherness is more frightening. The character chooses an object because objects do not resist identity construction.

The old man’s storyline initially appears independent. His world is ordered, ritualised and temporally anchored. He cooks, writes, plays accordion, drinks at fixed hours and writes reflections on solitude. Unlike the young man’s restless withdrawal, his solitude is mature and domesticated. He does not fight loneliness; he has organised it.

Yet the screenplay carefully aligns their actions in time. Both perform evening rituals around eight o’clock. Both talk to absent listeners. Both use music as a structuring presence. Both maintain almost sacred attention to small objects. Gradually the spectator realises the film does not present two characters but two temporal positions of the same consciousness.

The hinge of the narrative lies in writing. The old man writes a text titled “Share (!) Yourself”. The young man later finds and reads fragments of the same words. The opening monologue of the film, spoken by the old man, reappears as a written message discovered by the young man. The film therefore folds its own beginning into its ending. Time ceases to be linear and becomes recursive.

The structure can be described as biographical circularity. Youth imagines solitude as discovery; age understands it as conclusion. The young man constructs solitude, the old man completes it. The script never confirms explicitly that they are the same person, yet all cinematic evidence converges toward this interpretation: identical spaces, mirrored habits, inherited objects, temporal overlaps, shared language and finally the manuscript connecting them.

The hanger plays a crucial role in this transformation. For the young man it is a future substitute for human presence; for the viewer it becomes the early stage of the old man’s complete withdrawal into inner dialogue. What appears as eccentric behaviour becomes origin story.

The film also treats sound as narrative architecture. The accordion heard through the wall first belongs to the neighbour, then to the future self. Noise becomes communication across time. Similarly, the repeated vinyl record functions as temporal anchor: music is memory without explicit recollection. The characters cannot talk to each other, yet they share acoustic space.

Alcohol, cigarettes and routine operate not as realism but as temporal markers. The young man drinks to escape; the old man drinks to maintain continuity. The same gesture changes meaning across life stages. The screenplay therefore explores how identical actions produce opposite psychological functions depending on time.

The final sequence completes the circle. The young man reads the old man’s words, approaches the apartment and discovers absence. The neighbour may never have existed physically. He returns to the street, calls someone and merges with the crowd. For the first time he moves toward people rather than away from them. The film ends not with union but with possibility.

The title “Share (!) Yourself” becomes ironic. Throughout the film both characters avoid sharing. Only after confronting his projected future does the young man attempt contact. The exclamation mark signals urgency — communication must occur before identity closes into self-dialogue.

The screenplay therefore constructs a psychological time loop. It is not a story about two lonely individuals but about the life cycle of solitude. Youth aestheticises it, maturity organises it, old age inhabits it completely. The film visualises how the self can become its own only companion.

The unique structure lies in transforming character into timeline. Instead of showing one person aging, the film spatialises time into two apartments. The viewer experiences biography simultaneously rather than sequentially. Cinema becomes memory architecture: rooms instead of years.

In the end the narrative asks a simple question: is solitude freedom or inertia? The young man’s final movement toward the crowd suggests that identity requires risk — the risk of misunderstanding. Without it, the self eventually becomes both speaker and listener, author and reader, neighbour and stranger within the same room.