You could say Ilko Davidov learned English from Lemmy. As a teenager in Sofia, Bulgaria, in the late 70s, he scoured the black market for albums by Motorhead, Kiss, Deep Purple, and Black Sabbath. “The antiauthoritarianism of the lyrics appealed to me,” he says. “I wondered how they understood how we felt, when they lived in a free society and their government let them do that.”
His parents were classical music fans, taking him on frequent trips to the opera, though his father occasionally picked up pop records on business trips abroad. But Davidov’s introduction to rock was a Jimi Hendrix record in his older sister’s collection. “I didn’t quite like it, but I played it again and again,” he says. “It was a very strange feeling.” He began working his way into Sofia’s subculture of rock collectors. “Even the process of finding one song was a big deal,” he says. “It was like an archaeological expedition to find a tape of a tape that someone recorded from Voice of America.”
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
Davidov and his teenage friends haunted the local black market, convened in a park every night around seven, where records sold for half a month’s salary. He could only afford one new LP a year, but the dealers also offered a more affordable option. “They would tape it for you for a fee,” he says. “I would give the guy my blank tape, and pay, and the next day I’d get the tape.”
“They said ‘your parents will lose their jobs, they’ll be tried for treason, their property will be confiscated,’” he says. “I couldn’t do that to my parents. I bought a Ramones record and went back to Sofia.”
Davidov’s first feature documentary as a director, Unauthorized and Proud of It, examined the unsolved murder of San Diego comics publisher Todd Loren, who published a string of unauthorized comic-book biographies of rock stars and celebrities before he was found stabbed to death in his bed in 1992. Touring with Unauthorized on the festival circuit in 2005 planted a seed in Davidov’s brain. “A lot of those festivals are associated with music or films related to music, and I found that fascinating,” he says. “I thought Chicago would be a great place for it, and there’s nothing like that here.”
Davidov and Chicoine scrapped plans to pay themselves salaries, ruled out some bigger-ticket items they’d hoped to include—like DJ Spooky appearing with his film Rebirth of a Nation, Mika Kaurismaki’s Sonic Mirror, about fusion drummer Billy Cobham, and Kasper Collin’s My Name Is Albert Ayler, about the avant-garde saxophonist—and eliminated film projection in favor of cheaper digital projection. Some filmmakers they’d booked backed out to save their premieres for SXSW. “Next year we’re going to move the date to after South by Southwest, hopefully in early April,” Davidov says.
