While we all know there is no rose without a thorn, London-based director Joya Berrow's latest film for NOWNESS offers a pleasingly soft and sensual study of a farming community in the Bulgarian countryside who depend on this sumptuous crop. The workers pursue an appropriately delicate agriculture which depends not on fierce machinery but human delicacy, and the work of patient, studious hands. The film continues Berrow's concern with traditional and out-of-the-way practices (her last film, Away with the Land, was a slow cinematic study of farming in the Scottish islands).

“The film transports you through the Rose Valley of Bulgaria in a stream of consciousness [and] follows the process and ritual of the annual rose harvest," explains Berrow, whose film is produced by Ivan Olita's BRAVÒ. "Encountering multiple characters and exploring their symbiotic connection to the land," the films searches "for how they continue to find freedom and survive from the land."