Bulgarian Students Win Third Place in International Japanese Video Contest

A team of four freshmen from the bachelor's program "Methodology of Foreign Language Teaching - Japanese" at the Burgas Branch of Sofia University "St. Kliment Ohridski" won third place in the Central and Eastern European Japanese Video Contest 2025, an international video competition in Japanese, organized by The Japan Foundation.

The award comes at a particularly important moment for the Branch, as the program "MFLT - Japanese" of the Faculty of Classical and New Philologies is being implemented for the first year in Burgas.

The students' success is proof that even at the beginning of their studies, future Japanese language teachers develop confidence in communicating, including creatively. 

The video was shot on the Burgas coast of the Black Sea and follows the theme of the competition "The Taste of Home".  "The direction and the story were so funny that we felt like we were watching a comedy film. We felt a strong sense of originality in the composition of the video," these are some of the comments published by the jury regarding the work of the Burgas students. 

The Japan Foundation is an institution established in 1972 with the mission to develop Japan's international cultural exchange.

According to the terms of the competition, candidates from the following 13 countries where Japanese is not a native language are admitted: Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Croatia, Czech Republic, Hungary, Kosovo, Montenegro, North Macedonia, Poland, Romania, Serbia, Slovakia and Slovenia.

The team of Temenuga Georgieva, Iveta Ivanova, Tony Kolev and Danail Denchev impressed the jury with a bold story about "the taste of home", a sense of humor and original composition. Their award is the first business card of the new specialty and a motivating start for the Japanese language community in Burgas.