Deadline's Damon Wise reviews "Black Money for White Nights," a new Bulgarian drama by Kristina Grozeva and Petar Valchanov that screened at the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival. The review frames the film as part of a strong year for Bulgarian cinema and praises it as an incisive portrait of a post-Soviet, black-market economy in which corruption is woven into everyday survival, with police and criminals taking the largest share while ordinary people scrape by.

The story follows Marina (Tanya Shahova), a midwife who pools cash bribes from patients, and her husband Gosha (Ivan Savov), a station master who lets bootleggers siphon diesel from idle tankers. The couple saves their illicit earnings for a dream pilgrimage east — to the "White Nights" of Dostoevsky's St. Petersburg and onward via the Trans-Siberian Express to China — at a cost of 10,310 leva (about $6,000), with a 3% cash discount. The filmmakers withhold the year for dramatic effect: Bulgaria adopted the euro in January 2026, and the plot pivots when a newsreader announces Russia's invasion of Ukraine, forcing the couple to reroute their now-banned flights via non-EU Belgrade. Wise likens the film's bleak "no dream goes unpunished" tone to the directors' earlier "Blaga's Lessons," which won Karlovy Vary's Crystal Globe in 2023 and became Bulgaria's Oscar submission.