Set largely in taxis, Stephan Komandarev’s gem of an ensemble drama dissects the sometimes cruel, sometimes ironic vagaries of life in today’s Sofia, Bulgaria. Beginning with the story of taxi driver Misho (Vassil Vassilev-Zuek), a broke father who shoots a corrupt banker and then turns the gun on himself in an unsuccessful suicide attempt, Komandarev fashions a daisy-chain narrative wherein everything that follows is somehow related to Misho’s tragedy. Suffused with a world-weary Eastern-European melancholy, Komandarev’s zeitgeist snapshot is leavened by flashes of drollery. Ultimately, it offers a pugnacious sense of optimism about the future, despite all the evidence to the contrary…

"[This] clever, fleet-footed film observes [life in Sofia] with poignant accuracy and flashes of wry humour… In the many long-take interior shots in cars, Directions recalls the work of Iranian masters Abbas Kiarostami and Jafar Panahi, but its nighttime setting and the idiosyncratic individuals it portrays also bring to mind Jim Jarmusch’s Night on Earth… The psychologically insightful exchanges that make up the majority of the runtime exist to be more than just quirky. Loosely linked as they are, they build to a choral impression of a society that, while riven by division, corruption and the exploitation of the poor by the rich, still somehow holds out hope for itself…"—Jessica Kiang, Variety