Other Houses

S. Cagney Gentry and Thomas Southerland · 2025 · 95 minutes
Nov. 8 · Regal 2 · 1:00 p.m.

Immigrant Radka Winslow must choose between the American Dream or living a creative life back in Bulgaria. Other Houses tells the poetic and funny story of Radka’s life-changing summer of choices. 

Programmer’s Note

In early 2012, Thom Southerland heard Katerina Stoykova on WRFL, the University of Kentucky’s student-run radio station. “I thought her voice and storytelling skills were mesmerizing and wondered if I could build a film around such an intriguing person,” he later told the Northern Kentucky Tribune. Within a few weeks, he was a guest on Stoykova’s arts and culture show and began learning about the unlikely path that brought her from Bulgaria to central Appalachia, including her decision a few years earlier to abandon her career as a software engineer to reclaim her love of writing. Stoykova has since won several prestigious awards and grants for her collections of poetry and translations.

Their first film, Proud Citizen (2014), like all of their collaborations, is a work of fiction that borrows occasionally from Stoykova’s real life, which, combined with Southerland’s stripped-down style, gives their films a heightened realism. It’s tempting to mistake these movies for documentary. Southerland and Stoykova, joined by filmmaker S. Cagney Gentry, made a second feature in 2018, Fort Maria, and now return with a third, Other Houses, in which Stoykova plays Radka Winslow, a divorced empty-nester who has decided, with great misgivings, to sell her home and return to Bulgaria, where she will finally be able to afford to live as a full-time poet.

At the risk of sounding cliche, Other Houses is, among many other things, a film about the importance of storytelling as a creative, therapeutic, and political act. The film weaves together Radka’s poems with those of her students, with letters sent to her by potential homebuyers, and with luxuriant conversations. (Any doubts that Southerland and Gentry are among the few American filmmakers indebted to recent work by Korean filmmaker Hong Sang-soo should be erased by the final minutes of Other Houses.) Radka’s love-hate relationship with the American Dream — not just as an immigrant but as a soulful person exhausted by the daily grind — will feel familiar to many.

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Cagney Gentry is a teacher of filmmaking at Wake Forest. He has made a variety of short films, feature films, documentary and narrative, that have played at juried festivals around the country and won many awards. His most recent work includes Fort Maria, which won the Jury Prize and Best Cinematography award at the Ashland Independent Film Festival and the Best Director award from the BendFilm Festival in 2018. His most recently completed film, a short film, Half Sisters, has premiered at Mammoth Lakes Film Festival in California and is streaming on the indie film platform NoBudge.

Thomas Southerland is a filmmaker and educator from Lexington, Kentucky. His first narrative feature, Proud Citizen, won the Jury Prize at the New Orleans Film Festival in 2014 and eight other Jury and Audience awards at film festivals around the country. His second narrative feature, Fort Maria, won multiple prizes as well. His recent short documentary, Window Treatment, has screened at New Orleans, IFFBoston, RiverRun,the Florida Film Festival, Tallgrass, and Cucalorus. His documentary film, I’m the Girl – the story of a photograph, is streaming on Kanopy and was televised nationally via PBS.