“The real strength of Nina Roza lies in the delicate, inventive, and emotionally resonant way Dulude-de Celles brings this story to the screen.”

Early in Nina Roza, a moving and mysterious drama by Québécois filmmaker Geneviève Dulude-de Celles, an art dealer speaks about the power of paintings to revive “hazy memories” and “distant recollections.” This turns out to be true for both Mihail, the middle-aged protagonist who returns to his native Bulgaria after spending 28 years in Canada, and the director herself, whose ability to bring a poetic, evocative sensibility to images that bridge the past and present elevates what appears to be a familiar tale of homecoming on paper. As a lovingly crafted and engaging journey across decades and continents, Nina Roza will likely enjoy an extensive run on the festival circuit following its high-profile bow in the Berlinale competition, and has the potential to attract distributors looking for accomplished arthouse fare.

Mihail (Galin Stoev) encounters paintings by an eight-year-old girl named Nina (Sofia Stanina) when a video featuring her work goes viral. He is asked by a collector to travel to Bulgaria in order to authenticate the paintings, but he remains skeptical at first. Completely immersed in Canadian culture, speaking French even with his somewhat estranged daughter Rose, and using Michel as his adopted name, Mihail is not exactly looking forward to a long business trip to the Bulgarian countryside. He believes it is very likely that an adult (maybe her parents, maybe one of her fellow villagers) is “helping” Nina and is working hard to create a misleading “child prodigy” narrative. But after he arrives in Nina’s village, memories from the life he abandoned in Bulgaria start coming back and he finds himself drawn to the young girl, particularly because she reminds him of Rose/Roza, who was at the same age when the father-daughter duo migrated to Canada in the aftermath of a devastating loss.

Dulude-de Celles works with a contrived premise in Nina Roza and, despite the initial mystery surrounding Nina’s talent, the story she tells turns out to be free of any major surprises. Mihail gradually and tentatively reconnects with the family members he left behind and has not seen in decades, establishes a meaningful bond with Nina and her mother, and returns to Canada with a renewed understanding of what it means to be a family. Some of these plot points remain underdeveloped and could benefit from being fleshed out in more detail. An emotional reunion between Mihail and his Bulgarian relatives, for example, plays out beautifully in a lovely sequence late in the film, yet very little screen time is devoted to this significant subplot as the only build-up to it is a wordless phone call and there is not much of a follow-up, either.

But the real strength of Nina Roza lies in the delicate, inventive, and emotionally resonant way Dulude-de Celles brings this story to the screen. Her style is reminiscent of directors like Alice Rohrwacher and Carla Simón, whose earthy, tactile imagery and thematic preoccupation with family ties seem to be significant sources of inspiration here. Like Simón’s Romería (2025, presented in Cannes competition last year) or Rohrwacher’s Lazzaro Felice (2018) and La Chimera (2023), Nina Roza is at its strongest when half-remembered details from the past start seeping into the slippery reality the characters inhabit. The most memorable parts of the film capture how ghosts from his family history continue to haunt Mihail’s present. A vinyl record of old Bulgarian hits, a village celebration where a song sung in whispers takes over the soundscape, momentary glimpses of Mihail’s wife (so vivid and so distant at once) all convey a deep sense of longing, perhaps even regret. Even though Mihail says he “thinks in French” and approaches this homecoming as nothing more than an inconvenient professional obligation, it gradually becomes evident that the psychological toll of long-term displacement is more complex than Mihail would like to admit.

The modern art world is an easy target for satire and has been frequently ridiculed in contemporary world cinema. Ruben Östlund’s The Square (2017) immediately comes to mind alongside more recent titles like Cathy Yan’s The Gallerist (2026), fresh off its Sundance premiere last month. To her credit, Dulude-de Celles is able to avoid delivering yet another lazy and predictable critique of the global art industry and offers a more nuanced look that emphasizes the elusive nature of genius and the transformative potential of genuinely powerful works. The investigation into Nina’s creative process resembles Nadav Lapid’s The Kindergarten Teacher (2014), for instance, in which profound poems written by a child poet become the source of both fascination and mockery. Dulude-de Celles directs her critique at the exploitative marketplace, which, as Mihail knows all too well, will not allow Nina to remain in Bulgaria or cultivate her artistic identity at her own pace. Nina’s disdain for the Italian gallerist who has already taken away many of her paintings reveals the blatant commodification of art and the young girl’s unwillingness to adapt to the demands of the market.

Nina Roza is a worthy addition to the already-crowded roster of films dealing with many facets of the immigrant experience. Homecoming is neither a joyful celebration nor a traumatic confrontation here; the film presents a more thoughtful and multi-layered perspective on this well-worn trope of immigration cinema. Dulude-de Celles skillfully portrays the in-betweenness of her protagonist and finds surprising ways of visualizing a liminal space between cultures, identities, and time periods. While Mihail does not discover anything new during his return to Bulgaria, his journey still proves to be meaningful in many ways as he navigates both the unspoken legacy of his own displacement and the perils of an increasingly transactional art landscape.