The girl against the shield is Slavinia Katsarska, I find her in her apartment in the center of Sofia. There she often spends hours working in front of the computer. He lives with his friend, who had a bandaged arm due to a cut from the clashes. Slavinia is an assistant producer in a production company in Sofia. "My daily life consists of a full day of work and an evening of protests," she says. Her reason for going every day is because of the "brutal appointments". According to her, the government has shown how power is abused. On the night of July 23, she accuses the Ministry of Internal Affairs as provocateurs for the decision to try to take the MPs out by bus. He described the action as insane and believed it was destined to lead to conflict. "In fact, all we were doing was sitting there refusing to let the MPs leave, and even though it was clear we were going to block them, they tried to go past us, through us, and that's how the conflict happened." About the footage from that night, she says: "It shows us actually being pushed by the police, and we're trying to defend our positions, and our presence in the square somehow expresses this opinion that we're not happy, that we want to be hears that we want resignation, that we want early elections, but unfortunately there is no communication with the protesters and as a result, people are angry and taking more radical measures in terms of these blockades, but no one has called for violence, we just we sat there and tried to stand our ground."

This is Nikolay Iliev, currently working as a taxi driver. Before I took his picture at his workplace, we talked for a long time about the political situation in the country and why people abroad have a hard time understanding the protests in Bulgaria. According to him, there is no way to explain to them that the managers are purposefully steering the "ship" towards a disaster. I asked him to try to summarize in a few sentences why he participated in the actions against the government. "Because of the backstage in Bulgarian politics", he says confidently and adds: "It is impossible for a prime minister not to be able to remember the names of the people in his team when he introduces them, because he was told ten minutes before giving a press conference. This cabinet must to resign immediately, because when asked to tell the truth about Delyan Peevski's candidacy, he replied: "You want me to lie to you." The Bulgarian prime minister, who replies that he must lie to me when I ask him for the truth, not for a hundred days , and for a hundred minutes he cannot get support from me, regardless of which political force he is from," Nikolay believes. He shared that he often goes to the protests with his son. He is three years old. In the photo, on his father's shoulders, he is holding a gun as a response to the leader of "Attack" Volen Siderov, who with a weapon, but not a plastic one, enters the parliament, "threatens citizens with arrests just because they have a different position from his". "This is an absurdity that must be put to an end." Nikolay does not want his son to protest again in 15 or 20 years for the same reasons as today. Nikolay adds: "The PES leader, with his inability to oppose the behind-the-scenes appointments in the cabinet that his party supports, is totally discrediting himself and I think that in Europe he will not be forgiven and he will be replaced from this post, which because European socialists certainly do not imagine such a model of government in their own countries." Nikolay thinks that the protest is not going in a good direction. His fears are: "As long as the Bulgarian man protests at home only at the table, while the Bulgarian woman protests only after working hours and shouts "resignation" at an empty building, we will not have a very good development of things. Because how outraged is a person who shouts "resignation" , immediately", when he is ready to do it only at a time convenient for him after work. We cannot be rebels and patriots only after 7:00 p.m."

We arranged to meet at the park where she often walks. Her name is Vasilena Radeva, she likes more extreme experiences, mostly related to the mountains, but since she is currently 9 months pregnant, she mostly adventures in city parks. She is a theater director by profession and vocation. The reason she protested, according to her, was the desire for a better life and the justice of the cause of having civil control in politics. She says: "We all walked out 46 days ago, driven by our genuine outrage, but now the cause is much bigger. We are awake and we care. We are sick of being ruled by unscrupulous people with low mental capacity. "My inspiration for this protest is the future I carry inside me (at this point, she touches her stomach with her hands). I chose to live in Bulgaria, even though my husband is American. It is very important for me to raise my family in my country and for our child to develop in a really good environment. Because the protests are already going on for many evenings and in fact it is taking away from our personal time, which is also time for personal enrichment. I chose during this protest to be a little more distant and read. The book in the picture is "Theatricality - the language of performance". So I decided that I would combine defending my civic position with something useful for my professional development."

These are Rumyana Tsoneva and Manol Glishev. They met and gathered at the protest. We meet as they walk together to the square. Rumyana is a second-year history student and protests against the current government and their "insolent decisions, to put it mildly". After that, Manol joins the conversation rather passionately: "In my opinion, this government is not even a cabbage patch." He works in an IT firm and says his salary has directly suffered since the government came to power. "In addition, I personally do not want to pay for the Belene NPP at all. I do not need the Belene NPP at all, and not only do I not need a loan from Russia, I also do not need this incompetent economist pretending to be the prime minister and promises with borrowed money to give money to the poor," says Manol. "I was poor, I may soon be again if things go this way. It is a bad idea to lend money to the poor." Then Manol shared with me that Rumyana is always very worried about cameras and speaking in front of them, but otherwise she is very active during the protests. "And some are the opposite, they talk a lot in front of the cameras and act a little," he adds.

One of them, who I filmed jumping the fences, is Ivan Dimitrov. He organizes literary readings at the Art Hostel and is also a writer and playwright. He decides to symbolically jump over the fences around the parliament together with the others to show that no one can take away their freedom. According to him, these fences are illegal. Ivan wants to tell the people who ask the protesters why they only shout "resignation" and do not have any demands, that the government has shown from the very beginning what is behind it and without any pretense and with all its impudence it does new and new every day blunders and every day there are new and new reasons for a person to protest. For so many things that at one point he has no choice but to shout "resign". He thinks that the division between the February and June protests is pointless, according to him, this is how propaganda for the division of left and right is introduced. Chants of "red trash" have contributed to this division, but he says the problem lies with this huge part of the political class who do whatever they want and politicians rely on the fact that people are already so desperate that they think they can't do anything to do.

This is Borislav Popov - a manager in a company dealing with software for intelligent search and text analysis mainly for media abroad such as BBC, Oxford University Press... He is also involved in Buddhism, before that he was involved in skydiving, was bungee instructor, father of one. He says about himself that he always had the opportunity to go abroad, but he stumbled and decided that he should live in Bulgaria. "It was actually a sit-in protest, there were a lot of other people around me. When the policemen came, they directly jumped on me with their shields," says Borislav about the footage from the night of the blockade. "It wasn't a gradual push, it was jumping with the shields on some people sitting down." He adds what can be seen in the photo: "I am shouting at the police that there are women and children. I have always been in favor of the peaceful conduct of the protests, that is why what is happening is unique. If violence is resorted to, this protest will not be legitimate. Unique also with the fact that if we compare it with all other protests in Bulgaria, and in Europe and around the world, there is also a difference in the demands. They are not so much economic, they are simply for more moral rulers... Borislav also tells why he protested: "What worries me is my daughter and how she would grow up in this environment. I, more or less, and the people I work with, live in a pink bubble, we have good jobs, good relationships, our friends are of a certain type, and we are a bit unaffected by this general trend of loss of values ​​that we see here. I will quote my grandfather, who is a strong person and in such moments he says: "Bulgaria, Bulgaria, they died for you and just talking about your name, countless died," says Borislav and says: "Actually, we would like to have not politicians, but statesmen, and those statesmen have a value system that we ourselves see as higher than our own values. To be able to look at one of these people and say, "Wow, this person really has very high values, and I would like to be , like him." According to him, there is a "natural aversion to artificial authorities" in Bulgaria. "We must learn that we ourselves are responsible for our lives and we cannot continue to complain that communism, parents, the boss are to blame , we must take responsibility for our actions". He said steps towards direct democracy must be made, but they must be careful. What I am very proud of the people of the protest is that they for the most part are quite busy people, but they take the time to protest. Practically for the first time when I went to one of these protests, I felt like a citizen of this country and I was proud of it. It's because of the people I met there," Borislav also shares.