 After the death of the friend of the director Roman Ayvazov, a virtuoso violinist of gypsy origin, she began to look for audio and video recordings of his performances. The only thing she could find was one poor-quality amateur audio recording. At that moment she realized, with sorrow and shame, that many of the exceptional musicians she loved to listen to in her youth, like Mutsi Ayvazov, Chinchiri, and others, are no longer with us, and there s also no longer any trace of their music. The long years she spent abroad changed her attitude towards their music, which we had always considered very nice, but second-rank. The film Le Virtuose resulted from her desire to take some extraordinary musicians out of the context in which we are used to seeing them, and put them on a European stage, where they could be taken at their true value and appreciated for their virtuosity. The film tells of their journey from small Thracian villages and gypsy slums to some of the most prestigious stages in Brussels, where they performed for very pampered and sophisticated audiences. When she started work on the project, nobody was sure that she would be able to carry it out to fruition - especially the film s protagonists, who thought she was trying to put one over on them and that the plans she was working on had nothing to do with them. It turned out to be a real battle just to get the film made. She first got the idea for it back in early 2002, and she only just now managed to finish it. A great deal of the credit for the fact that it did get made goes to the Yehudi Menuhin Foundation, and its chief music expert, Thierry Van Roy. He was man enough to share the risk of this adventure of turning Cinderella into a princess - because that is exactly what happened. She discovered some of the musicians in the gypsy neighborhood near the graveyard of her home town, Nova Zagora, which they had never left before.