Coming to VOD today, Tuesday, February 10: LOVE & ENGINEERING
Tonislav Hristov’s look at an engineer’s attempts to hack dating debuted at DocPoint last year. It went on to screen at Tribeca, Hot Docs, Karlovy Vary, Sarajevo, Bergen, DOK Leipzig, Flahertiana, DokuFest Prizren, and Visions du Reel, among others. FilmBuff now releases the film on various VOD platforms, including Amazon Instant Video, Google Play, iTunes, Sony PlayStation, Vudu and Xbox Video.
Atanas, a Bulgarian engineer based in Finland, is confident that he has love figured out. After all, unlike his hapless colleagues, he’s married, while they struggle to even have a conversation with the opposite sex. Convinced he can apply science to the typically inscrutable laws of the heart, he offers to coach his four friends with the goal of finding them the perfect mate – even if he warns them they have to keep their expectations realistic: No models, but good companions. Hristov follows Atanas in his efforts to school his hopelessly nerdy guinea pigs, watching them through painfully awkward blind dates, scientific experiments, and counseling sessions with experts. As a whole, the result is a lighter, and sometimes humorous, exploration of the search for love, but it ultimately feels contrived and without any fundamental revelations that would make it particularly memorable.
what (not) to doc 