Of the many roles Katerina Stoykova has played in her life — electrical engineer, project manager, teacher, poet, publisher, arts administrator, author — actor was perhaps the most unexpected.

“I don't think of myself as an actress, and I wouldn't dare compare myself to other actors either,” she admits, “because the moment I start comparing myself or thinking about other actors, I wouldn't dare step on the set.”

The Twelve Lions Film Festival kicks off Friday, September 25 at the historic Kentucky Theatre and one of the selections I'm most excited about is Other Houses, a feature-length film set and produced in Lexington. Co-directed by Thom Southerland and Cagney Gentry, and starring Stoykova, who co-wrote the script with Southerland, Other Houses marks the third and final collaboration in a series the filmmakers call “The Bulgarian Trilogy.”

“Thom said he always wanted to do a black and white foreign film,” Stoykova said. “And I'm the closest thing that he's got, right?”

Other Houses centers on Radka Winslow (played by Stoykova), an immigrant poet who decides to sell her Lexington home and return to Bulgaria in search of a more affordable, creative life. As her house goes on the market, the film tracks her conflicting emotions about leaving behind the “American Dream” to return to her complicated birthplace. Between navigating awkward open houses and wrapping up her teaching gigs, Radka meets Victor (played by Lexington poet Jude McPherson), a potential buyer moving back to Lexington to care for his aging mother, which complicates her decision even further.

I was able to get a sneak peek at Other Houses, and I highly encourage everyone to see this beautifully filmed, funny, and deeply moving exploration of art, the spaces we inhabit, and the choices we make to find a true sense of belonging. The film's pace is casual and the grounded, perfectly modulated performances are reminiscent of the early-1990s indie realism of Jim Jarmusch and Mike Leigh.

How it started

Stoykova, Southerland and Gentry began collaborating in 2012, shortly after Southerland was a guest on Stoykova’s WRFL radio show and brought up the possibility of working together. “Thom said there is work in front of the camera. But I didn't know what that meant. I thought that I would be, I don't know, carrying a box from one side of the room to the other,” she recalls. “At some point, it dawned on me that I actually would be acting, and that terrified me, because I didn't want to ruin the movie.”

With some reassurance from Thom, she made her film acting debut in Proud Citizen, a feature about a Bulgarian playwright named Krasimira (Stoykova) who wins second place in an international playwriting contest. Her prize is a trip from Bulgaria to the Bluegrass State to see her dark, autobiographical, Communist-era play Black Coat produced on a small community theater stage. Over a hot July 4 weekend, Krasimira explores the local Kentucky culture entirely on foot, navigating awkward cultural barriers, unfamiliar suburban landscapes, and language gaps with the locals.

Stoykova 's trepidation about acting on camera for the first time was so profound that she would sometimes get lost on the way to the filming location. “My brain would make me take a wrong turn. And so I was very much afraid.” That dissipated after Southerland showed her some of the footage. “I thought, okay, I can do this. And after that, I relaxed.”

Proud Citizen screened at several film festivals and won several awards, including Best Narrative Feature at the New Orleans Film Festival. More importantly, it jump-started a collaboration with Gentry.

“Cagney is also a director, and he and Thom met at one of the festivals and really hit it off,” Stoykova says. “They have similar worldviews and similar aesthetics.” The two invited Gentry to join them on their next film, Fort Maria, where Stoykova plays an agoraphobic woman stuck in a house with a dead dog

Stoykova’s second outing as an actor proved less intimidating. “I was not scared, because I knew that Thom would have my back, and as an artist, I know one rule: do not work with people you do not trust. Even a little bit — even if there is something underneath, like, in your stomach, that says, don't trust this person.”

No script, just an outline

The films in the Bulgarian trilogy share three things in common: they were made in Lexington, shot in black and white, and largely improvised.

Unlike most narrative feature films, the team chose not to use a traditional screenplay. “There’s an outline,” Stoykova explained, and “Thom comes to us and says, this is what needs to happen, and then we make it work.”

As the primary creative team, Southerland, Cagney, and Stoykova worked together on the story for Other Houses. “We would suggest other things, or take things out, or put things in,” Stoykova says. While she’s careful about how much of her own life she'll admit to borrowing, one detail is undeniably autobiographical: both she and Radka teach poetry.

In fact, some of Stoykova 's former students play the students in Radka's poetry class in the film.

“They were people I have worked with, who have been my students, and four people who are from the leadership of the Kentucky State Poetry Society,” she explained. “The only thing that they had to do differently was remember to not call me Katerina, but to keep on calling me Radka. And then at some point, when I'm telling the class that I'm leaving — some of them believed it!”

Early years

Long before she ever set foot in front of the camera, eight-year-old Stoykova was living in Bulgaria when a poet came to her elementary classroom. “He spoke about poetry and read poems and told us what poetry does for you,” she recalled. “And I remember sitting there at the back and having the recognition that I will do that all my life.”

After school, she could hardly wait to tell her mother of this discovery. “She said, well, you have to write a poem, then. I was a little bit taken aback. But I went to my room and wrote a poem. And then, eventually, I was told that one is not enough, and then you have to write another.”

Stoykova started submitting her work “as soon as I learned how to address an envelope,” but unlike in the United States, where rejection letters pile up, in Bulgaria you simply don't hear back from publishers at all. “I think I was very lucky, because if I kept on receiving regular rejections, I probably would have stopped. But I kept on submitting — for years.”

Then one day, in 1987, someone told Stoykova how much they loved her poem, which came as a surprise, given that — as far as she knew — she had never been published. Unbeknownst to her, one of her poems had been selected and printed in a magazine.

“This was on a Friday, and, of course, the store that had the magazines was closed. I remember going there to the window and looking at the cover of the magazine that had my poem, but I had to wait till Monday before I could even see it.”

Over the next few years, Stoykova had poems published in every major magazine in Bulgaria, all while earning a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering.

She emigrated to the United States at 24 to marry her pen pal, Dan Klemer. “He had come a couple of times to visit me in Bulgaria and he formally proposed there and asked my hand from my mother.”

The couple first lived in Dayton, Ohio, then moved to Rochester, New York, where Stoykova completed a master’s degree in computer science at the Rochester Institute of Technology while her husband worked at Kodak. After she graduated, she was recruited by IBM in North Carolina where she worked as an engineer. She eventually earned an MBA from Virginia Tech and in 2004, she and her husband were recruited by Lexmark, so they moved to Lexington and started work on the same day.

Although she had been a published poet in Bulgaria, the move to America became an obstacle to the momentum of her burgeoning creative writing career.

For 11 years she didn’t write anything —  and no one was more surprised than she was. “Poetry was such a natural and big part of my life, I didn't know it was possible that it could just stop.”

She cites several reasons for the long silence, including not feeling proficient enough in English. But she also points to the lack of a literary community, which she believes can foster a life of isolation.

“You want people like you,” she explains. “Even if you never speak to them, you know that they're in the next room doing the same thing, and that normalizes what you're doing.”

But it all came rushing back one day as she was driving to work.

“I felt the jolt, kind of, like this jolt of electricity. I swerved into a Kroger parking lot and I wrote a poem. And it felt good in all the ways that creative writing feels good. I mean, it releases something — it connects you to a part, a view, that has been dormant.”

Since then, Stoykova didn’t just keep writing — she went on to earn an MFA in poetry and creative nonfiction and publish four volumes of her poetry. She's also helped other writers find their way into print: in 2010, she founded Accent Publishing with Klemer. Although they divorced in 2016, she maintains that their solid business relationship has been part of Accent’s success. “I respect him, he respects me. He remarried, I remarried. We're friends.”

Accent has published 120 books, with 30 more in some stage of development. Eighty are poetry but the press also publishes nonfiction, novels, memoirs, and short story collections. Stoykova has also written a handbook for poets navigating the process of publishing a book, The Poet's Guide to Publishing: How to Conceive, Arrange, Edit, Publish and Market a Book of Poetry.