"Thompson, who do you think will win an award this time?"
"Jelf, you idiot, how would I know? Anyway, whoever wins, it won't be you or me! This is the first film festival—who knows what the judging criteria are?" Thompson said irritably.
As newcomers to the film industry, Thompson and Jelf were full of curiosity about everything. Both had made films before, but like most movies, theirs had only enjoyed a three-day run in theaters.
Ever since the film academy had been established, Bulgaria's film industry had embarked on the fast track of development. In just a few short years, the industry had tripled in size.
It employed hundreds of thousands of people, produced more than three hundred films a year, and generated billions of lev in box office revenue.
Well, that was the film industry boasting about itself. In 1926, Bulgaria's total domestic box office amounted to only 760 million lev. Those billions in box office revenue probably referred to the global total.
Domestic box office figures could still be checked. As for overseas box office figures, rough estimates could be obtained from developed countries such as Britain and France, but in other regions, everything shown was pirated—who knew what the box office was?
In any case, Bulgaria was now the world's largest film producer. Market share? That concept simply did not exist in this era!
Outside Europe and America, filmmakers in other regions were struggling just to survive. Most theaters in those places stayed afloat by showing pirated films.
To sell their films as widely as possible, Bulgarian film companies charged merely a token one lev in licensing fees in many regions. In the end, people could not even be bothered to pay that one lev!
The only figure that could be counted was the number of films.