Batko Stamenov (Ruscen Vidinliev) is the ideal secret agent. Orphaned at an early age, he was adopted by his aunt, who later confessed to having been his real mother. But when she passes away and the doctor informs Batko that she died a virgin, it becomes clear to him that lying is a family trait. So when he’s approached by a member of the secret police who wants to recruit him as a spy, he’s more than happy to oblige. For his first mission, he is assigned to infiltrate the so-called "Club for New Thinking." This subversive student group meets to discuss a pseudo-philosophical novel called Zincograph, which tells the story of a raving lunatic who works at the Royal Zincography by day, and by night creates an ever-expanding — and wholly fictional — web of spies and saboteurs that bamboozles the country’s actual secret police.

Batko takes the lesson of Zincograph — that secrecy is both the weapon and the bane of espionage — to heart when he is unfairly dismissed from the department. His ego bruised, Batko takes his revenge when he conjures up an imaginary secret service department — to which he cheekily appends the acronym SEX — out of whole cloth. Thanks to his natural ability to lie through his teeth, he manages to recruit each and every member of the "Club for New Thinking" into his fictional espionage network, and soon has them all incessantly spying on each other. From the reports of his "agents," Batko builds up his own private archive of classified information — one that he will later use to wreak havoc on the government that spurned him.

Ferociously satirical and all too believable, Emil Christov’s über-stylish spy-movie pastiche is a dark political comedy that both castigates and celebrates the actions of its slick, irresistibly charismatic anti-hero. In this caustic vision of an authoritarian police state, there are no victims or victimizers, but only an enormous web of complicity and collaboration where the oppressors can have their own weapons turned against them.

Dimitri Eipides