film based on a search for the "Secret Book" of Bogomil Cathar beliefs

Dame Donna Owen (2-15-08)

The story of the film is based on a search for the "Secret Book", a book written with Glagolic letters (first Slav alphabet, made by St. Cyril and Methody).

The Secret Book is supposed to contain the base of the Bogomil beliefs, known also as Catharism (Bogomils, persecuted by the church, left their homeland, and started moving north west, spreading their way of living and thinking where ever they were going, and through Bosnia, Dalmatia, north Italy, reached the south of France, where they (known as Cathars) founded their new homeland.
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The exceptional actors gave their special mark to this film that was prepared and shoot by a wide international crew

*Region of Bitola and Prespa Lake - Macedonia
*Balchik - Bulgaria
*Paris and Villerouge-Termenes - France

The story of "The Secret Book"

Pierre Raymond (Jean Claude Carriere) is a passionate explorer, a man who devoted all his life to the quest of the original "Secret Book" , a book that exists as a legend in several religions and heresies, and it was "A Holly Book" fof the Bogomils, written with glagolic letters...

Leaded by the strange messages from the Balkan, brought to him by doves, he chooses Chevalier to search where he stoped...

...Chevalier (Thierry Fremont) . the son he had with the only women he loved in his life (Joanna)...

...the son he abandoned carried away by his dreams, the son he finds again, just before his death, carried by his wish to give over to him all the knoledge hecollected on his endles jurnies, but also the questions he didn't find answers for...

...the son who continued his quest into the unknown...

The quest begins from where the messages are coming from by the messenger doves, from Macedonia...

...and the sender is Pavle Bigorski, a man that identifing him self with the autenthic author of "The Secret Book" from the midle ages, (the book that is supposed to contain the principle of good and evil and the principle of power) jumped across the time barrier and tuched the essence of the Quest for the roots of Thruth...

...His family, his three brothers, like three strains implicated in the being of Macedonian people draws, each in his own way ( father Andrey through the faith, Gizus through the rebelian towards the evil that he find in the human society, while he was looking for the fortune, and the Legionary - the ultimate defender of the honour of his family and his country as well) the real picture of Macedonia, of the Balkan, for the teritories that appear as a part of an unknown World, but they are part of the wellknown Europe.
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The shooting of the film went in three phases, on different locations, in compliance with the demands of story:

In this adventure where Chevalier faces moments when dreams turn into reality and the reality becomes an endless dream. Dreams filled with sounds of the Song of Vocals, that Bogomils used to sing while they were leaded to meet their death. ... he finds many things that he did not even look for...

...like the love he found with Lydia (Labina Mitevska), the doctor in the mental hospital who treated Bigorski.

Their love gives birth to the next circle of life and quest...

All those searching for this book are in fact, searching for paths leading to the cognition of Life, for the source of power, and this paths are often even more important than the purpose of the quest it self, for while walking this paths, we are faced with the good and evil, their sources, the strange unknown powers, so closely connected to the origin of the world and most often, for us, recognizable as Mystery, embodied in the role of the Unknown...

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