At their best, horror movies reflect destabilisation caused by cracks in the social fabric. The crack indicated in the documentarist Andrey Paounov’s fiction debut January is the widening abyss that, one character fears, will swallow Bulgaria village by village, town by town; the entire world, he says, will eventually succumb to this state of waking death. Maybe it already has?
In a remote location in the Bulgarian mountains, sleighs are returning without their owners. In their place is a frozen wolf. Here the creative team tell us why shooting January needed realism and a touch of lunacy.
Luxembourg, Bulgarian and Portuguese co-production January, the first feature film for acclaimed documentary director Andrey Paounov, plunges viewers in a loop of snowy reality with Soviet elements and uncanny dialogue.