When an American Pursues Bulgarian Dreams

In The Black Sea, Crystal Moselle and Derrick B. Harden co-direct a lovely ode to finding one’s place even when feeling out of place. Photo: Metrograph Pictures/Courtesy Everett Collection

The Black Sea is not explicitly a political film. An energetic yet modest story about a Black Brooklyn man unexpectedly stuck in a small Bulgarian town populated entirely by white people, it’s a testament to the possibility that human connection can be forged anywhere on Earth, even between individuals of wildly different backgrounds.

Beneath the surface of that broader, uplifting theme, though, co-directors Crystal Moselle (The Wolfpack, HBO’s Betty) and Derrick B. Harden poke at issues like immigration and racism in ways that make this movie feel especially relevant even though it’s technically timeless.

“It’s funny, my dreams in America, they never really got answered,” says Khalid, the renaissance man who impulsively left his job as a barista to come to this village on the coast of the Black Sea. “Back home I could never have a shop,” he adds, alluding to the small café he successfully opens in Bulgaria with his new business partner, Ina (Irmena Chichikova). “I was trying to make a shop but most of the people that have shops, supermarkets, coffee shops: They’re all foreigners. But I come here and I got this.”

His comment speaks simultaneously to the opportunities that make America such a beacon to the world (for now, at least) and the racism embedded in its national fabric that makes it so hard for a guy who looks like Khalid to become successful. (The Black Sea also is nuanced enough to note that Khalid can sometimes be a victim of his own wanderlust. When he starts calling friends and relatives back home asking if they can wire him some money, it’s obvious they’ve bailed this dude out more times than they can count.)

The color of Khalid’s skin announces itself even more loudly in this Bulgarian environment, where there seemingly isn’t another melanated human for many, many miles. That’s what actually brings him here in the first place; in the opening sequence, an ailing Bulgarian woman consults with a psychic who tells her that the only way she can be cured is by having a Black man lay hands on her. “Where can I find a Black man?” the woman asks. “Facebook,” her all-knowing adviser suggests.

Hoping to score a big payday simply by touching this lady, Khalid journeys overseas only to find that she’s already dead and no one plans to compensate him, leaving him with no cash for a return flight. When his passport gets stolen, he becomes even more permanently stuck, a stranger in a strange land where the residents either treat him like trash or an exalted oddity.

With a Brooklyn accent way thicker than the matcha he eventually whips up at his café, Khalid seems uniquely equipped to deal with this situation. As played by Harden in an incredibly charismatic motion-picture acting debut, he is gregarious, charming, and nakedly openhearted. Within a day or two, he’s already hugging and greeting people in the streets as if they’re old friends. “Do you know the whole town?” asks Ina, stunned by his almost instant ability to establish rapport with others, fueled in some cases by a Bulgarian obsession with the same hip-hop artists Khalid loves. (“My man, you like DMX?” he shouts at one Bulgarian guy in a DMX T-shirt before asking if said man can help him find a job.)

If Harden weren’t such a naturally magnetic presence, The Black Sea would not work nearly as effectively as it does. But he’s fascinating and unpredictable to observe, carrying the entire film on his shoulders as if it weighs nothing at all. This is all the more impressive considering that the film has no script. Every scene is improvised, sometimes with actual actors like Harden and Chichikov but often with random Bulgarian people that Moselle and Harden pluck off the streets and thrust in front of a camera. This approach is right in Moselle’s wheelhouse; in scripted projects like Betty and the film on which that series was based, Skate Kitchen, she has demonstrated an aptitude for guerrilla filmmaking and a sharp eye for capturing moments that seem to unfold organically before our eyes, largely because they actually do. Harden shares a similarly adventurous sensibility.

The film’s tone is alternately bracing — the camera is unflinching when Georgi (Stoyo Mirkov), a tyrant who briefly hires Khalid to do odd jobs, beats him with a shoe after accusing him of trying to sleep with his wife — and jubilant. A sequence at an open-mic night at Blue Flowers, the mini-bistro Khalid and Ina run, reveals tiny, fun moments in quick succession — a guy in a captain’s hat playing “Hit the Road, Jack” on the accordion, Ina and Khalid dancing on a table to LL Cool J’s “Doin’ It” — cumulatively conveying a sense of palpable, infectious joy. When the whole motley crew of Eastern Europeans, led by Khalid, starts chanting, “Go, Brooklyn, go Brooklyn,” it’s a quietly moving act of cross-cultural harmony.

The Black Sea itself often looms in the background as an ever-present object of beauty and terror to Ina and Khalid, who are both afraid to venture into its unpredictable expanse. When they eventually do, the effort functions as a metaphor for Khalid’s experience in this film and, perhaps, a suggestion about how all of us should approach tumultuous times: by holding on to the person closest to you, riding the waves together, and doing the best you can to keep your heads above water.