The Museum of Fine Arts is offering a festival of seven recent Bulgarian films, of which the three I was able to see are a mixed bag. The title of Andrei Slabakov’s Wagner (1998; Friday at 8 p.m.) refers not just to the composer: it’s also the brand name of the hydraulic press at which Elena, the film’s heroine, devotedly toils. In this parable about Communism, Elena is at last rewarded for her zeal with a new apartment in a housing development. On her first night there, she dreams of finding the icebox stuffed with various foods, all of which she samples in a single take (I hope for the actress’s sake she wasn’t asked to do it over). Waking up hungry, Elena spends the rest of the film wandering around the building in search of a slice of bread, a process that exposes her to serial indignities at the hands of her grotesque neighbors. One husband-and-wife pair offer her clay in the shape of a drumstick; another force her to role-play at the dinner table but keep taking away her plate. From a Fellini-esque opening stuffed with eccentricities, the film winds a boring, annoying route through cut-and-dried tributes to Luis Buñuel (whose influence on Eastern European directors has never been more deadening than here) and Emir Kusturica — though the movie Wagner most resembles, no doubt accidentally, is Doris Wishman’s far superior sexploiter Bad Girls Go to Hell.

Based on a story by the contemporary Russian writer Lyudmila Petrushevskaya, Georgi Dulgerov’s Hourglass (1999; Saturday at 2:15 p.m.) is a visually cool and narratively opaque short feature in which a gangster either survives a car bombing or returns from the dead as a zombie, or both. In one scene, he and a female companion stroll through a park carrying a broken pane of glass whose reflected sunlight they aim at passers-by in order to " take out their souls. " I have no idea what any of this is about, but it’s elegant and engaging for the short time it’s on screen, and it haunts the mind after it’s over.

At the beginning of Nikolai Volev’s Goat Horn (1995; Saturday at 4 p.m.), which is set sometime during the Ottoman occupation of Bulgaria, a Christian farmer and his young daughter are forced to watch as Turks rape and murder the farmer’s wife. This scene (with questionable full female nudity) is a disturbing prelude to the farrago of strangeness that follows. The little girl becomes mute. The father takes her to live in a cave and gives her a haircut with a knife, whereupon she gets on top of a boulder and throws rocks down at him. Ten years later, she still has short hair, and she knows how to fight with sticks. Her father makes her put on an animal suit and help him avenge her mother’s death. Awakened to her sexuality after seeing a shepherd doing it with a sheep, the girl tries to seduce her father. He’s tempted but doesn’t give in, so she goes back to the shepherd, attacks him while wearing her animal suit, and gets him to chase her and have sex with her. The shepherd, who is Muslim, looks at her crucifix during a contemplative break and muses, " Perhaps God is one and we only give him different names. " It doesn’t end happily. At the Museum of Fine Arts this weekend, April 20 and 21.