Darko Mitrevski, who directed the Third Half movie, accused Bulgaria of de-facto banning the broadcast of this Holocaust film in Macedonia. The movie depicts the deportation of Macedonian Jews in March 1943, by Bulgarian forces acting on orders from Germany. Practically the entire Jewish community in Macedonia, over 7,000 strong, was destroyed in Treblinka.

Have you seen movies like Black Seed or the Red Horse aired in the past two, three years? The Bulgarian Foreign Minister, in an interview with a Macedonian media outlet, said that wants Third Half banned and there was no response to this demand. Even more, she said that she wants it banned, and it was banned. It was last broadcast on the Macedonian public television the day that Borisov came to Skopje and then it was gone. It is a movie about the past, but somehow it became a movie about the future, Mitrevski said during an interview with Alfa TV.

Top Bulgarian officials reacted angrily when the movie was produced, almost a decade ago, decrying the depiction of the Bulgarian army as organizing the deportation of the Jews. “Work on the movie began in 2002, and I never knew it would cause such an outrage in Bulgaria. I honestly didn’t know that the deportation of the Jews from Vardar Macedonia, done under Bulgarian occupation, is a forbidden topic in Bulgarian society, that it’s an issue nobody there knows about”, Mitrevski added.