News

Set in an isolated wood cabin during a heavy snow storm, Director Andrey M Paounov and Screenwriter (and long time Dn alum) Alex Barrett’s frosty feature January is the tale of an encroaching mystery that is set to devour the lives of five men who find themselves caught in a limbo between life and death, past and present, communism and capitalism, known and unknown. It’s inspired by Yordan Radichkov’s play of the same name but whilst that play is concerned with a world where small settlements start to perish, Paounov and Barrett’s film is one where the world and reality itself is at risk of collapse. Shot in gothic black and white photography and with a clever acknowledgement of cinema’s relationship with itself, it’s a feature with striking imagery that’ll linger long in the mind after the credits roll. Dn sat down with...

Andrey Paounov’s opaque but arresting feature turns on mysterious disappearances and wolfish arrivals in a deep dark forest

Here’s a bitter, odd, quirky shaggy-dog ghost story with a wintry chill. Award-winning Bulgarian documentary film-maker Andrey Paounov makes his fiction feature debut with this adaption, along with British co-writer Alex Barrett, from a stage play by Bulgarian author Yordan Radichkov. Two middle-aged men are shivering in a remote snowy hut just on the border of a dark forest full of wolves. They are the Porter (Samuel Finzi) and the Old Man (Iossif Surchadzhiev), and they are … what? Forest rangers? Officials at a science research station? A third resident, Petar, has gone into town earlier, taking with him the horse-and-sled and his rifle.

While Petar is away, a sinisterly threatening man (Zachary Baharov) shows up with another man whose face is obscured by scarves, demanding help with his damaged snow plough.