Slav Velkov is a Bulgarian filmmaker and painter who seeks the human capacity to change and the excitement of exploring the universal emotions that encapsulate the human condition. His work has reached 1M+ people online and has screened at dozens of festivals, including the Soho International Film Festival and the Big Apple Film Festival in New York.

Most recently, Slav premiered his latest narrative short, Strangers, at The Soho IFF (2023). The film explores the themes of ambivalence and love in big-city life and focuses on a marriage proposal gone wrong in Chinatown.

One of Slav’s most significant projects is his short social video about the 2020 protest in Bulgaria. The film showcased the faces of young people eager to change their country and became a hit on Facebook, garnering 4.5K+ shares and 1M+ views in less than 48 hours. As part of the short movie and a handful of other projects, Slav has appeared on Bulgarian National Television, Bulgaria on Air TV, and other prominent news stations, where he advocated for critical thinking on social media, a transparent judicial system, and sustainability in Bulgaria’s capital, Sofia.

As a painter, Slav seeks to capture the universal power of the human face - specifically in the eyes - to express and invoke the plethora of human emotions. He feels that within the emotional experiences of the human condition lies a universal and transcendent power to communicate. He places his subjects in larger formal structures that reconcile Orthodox Christian, Romantic, Bulgarian folk, and Early Renaissance influences to showcase the universality of that communicative power. Most recently, he sold one of his largest paintings, Zavet, to a private collector.

In addition, Slav worked as an AD Trainee at Lionsgate and as a Video Production Intern at The Wall Street Journal. He understands the organizational, technical, and editorial processes behind media production, and he utilizes the skills he acquired on big sets to communicate his ideas and vision.