Bulgarian filmmaker Stefan Kotzev had a more traditional scripted drama in mind for his first feature than what he eventually made. Working in close collaboration with fellow Cologne Academy of Media Arts student Lee Juho, he came up with Why hasn’t everything disappeared yet, a cool, meditative portrait of a lonely art school dropout, Moon Sori (Lee), contending with the persistent memories of his old life in South Korea.
Portraiture is an important motif in Koutzev’s film, and not just because of Sori’s vaguely artistic milieu. His atypical character study aims to illuminate, but not so much that Sori, and the audience with him, will arrive at some answer about how to, for example, tell his parents that he actually dropped out of art school months ago; or how to contend with what seems like unacknowledged trauma from his mandated military service in Korea. The revelation of Koutzev’s film is in just how deeply Sori burrows into himself; all the viewer can do is to try to make sense of him from the outside.
Koutzev perplexes the viewer on a number of occasions with warm, humanistic results. The opening scene is one example. In dramatic close-ups we see a teenage girl and her younger brother riding a bus. They’re speaking Bulgarian — a nod to Koutzev’s native country — but are on their way to somewhere in Germany, until the sister realizes they’re heading in the wrong direction. She calls her mother, who seems worried for her children and mad at their father, and laughs off the mistake. Pulled between two places, they’re not too worried; the boy goes back to drawing in his book while she sticks gummy worms to the bus’s windows.
We never return to the brother and sister. Instead, Koutzev introduces us to Sori, fooling around one evening on his rooftop. He jumps over chairs, looks down to the street. He squirts juice from a pouch at a child below, laughs floating back up to him. Sori sketches the outlines of a bust in his sketchbook, the blank spaces between the crisp lines promising the infinite detail with which Sori might fill them. But those details don’t arrive as one might expect. No longer in art school and aiming for a sense of purpose, Sori seems to float through from one day to the next, subsisting on a combination of social encounters – some with fellow Korean expats, during which the conversation inevitably fixates on memories of their prior military service; another with a young German woman with whom he speaks in German and Korean about memories of home — and solitude; when he’s not skateboarding at night, he’s driving bumper cars at a local fun fair or wandering in the woods surrounding the Cologne airport, along the way making friends with roaming donkeys and climbing a tree.
In Sori, Kotzev and Lee have identified a blank slate onto which they can carve the textures that give contemporary urban life its melancholic character: a distant phone call with his mother, meandering conversations with acquaintances, copious alone time. These don’t add up to a complete portrait of who Sori is, but there is a cumulative effect, culminating at the airport. As he watches the planes come and go, we finally gain some insight into a state of mind constantly searching for something out of reach.
Published as part of IFFR 2026 — Dispatch 2.
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