02/07/2024 - Bulgarian director Pavel G Vesnakov follows the awakening of a rootless soul amidst the remnants of an abandoned past

Ognyan "FYRE" Pavlov (right) and Veselin Petrov in Windless

Three years after his existentially sensitive debut, German Lessons [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Pavel G Vesnakov
film profile], featuring a man hesitant about emigrating in order to escape his complicated life, Pavel G Vesnakov has returned with the even grimmer and more contemplative Windless [+see also:
trailer
interview: Pavel G Vesnakov
film profile], in which a kind of mirror character unfolds – one who has emigrated and now returns to clear up the scattered remains of the mess left behind. But he also does so to piece together his fragmented memory and involuntarily catch up on key details he had missed, even if only through other people's stories. What connects both protagonists is not so much their threshold situation as their ongoing hesitation, for which there seems to be no firm solution. It is precisely on this state of mind, rather than on the way out of it, that Windless is focused, turning itself into a meditative experience. The film has just celebrated its premiere in the Proxima competition of the 58^th Karlovy Vary International Film Festival, building on the “miserabilism” of last year’s Crystal Globe winner, Blaga’s Lessons [+see also:
film review
interview: Stephan Komandarev
film profile] (again set in the depopulated Bulgarian countryside), with an artistic impulse and cinematic poetry in the face of universal despair. 

Windless begins with a gloomy opening sequence, featuring solitary figures under an overcast grеy sky, who meet in silence but have clearly been familiar with each other for a long time. Тop-to-bottom tattooed Kaloyan (Ognyan "FYRE" Pavlov) has returned briefly from Spain to get rid of his family apartment, which will soon be bulldozed along with many other dwellings and the cemetery in this deserted former mining town, to make way for a casino, a spa complex, and a golf course. As he disposes of his recently deceased father's belongings and his mother conducts the process via video from Spain, he also visits neighbours and old acquaintances, and helps a childhood friend clean other soon-to-be-demolished apartments with soon-to-be-evicted elderly people inside. Discarding the remnants of the once bustling town wears down Kaloyan's indifference, as does the devastating sight of bones exhumed from the cemetery in plastic bags. Unexpectedly, even for Kaloyan himself, he begins to cherish the pieces of past lives that accompany each tossed-out item while listening to heroic stories about his estranged father.

The bold, somewhat startling cinematography, made of sharply cut close-ups in an airless square format, as well as the frames accentuating details rather than the whole picture, are achieved by Vesnakov's regular DoP collaborator Orlin Ruevski. This approach might look pretentious at first glance but gradually falls into place. Such a narrowed and fragmented viewpoint belongs to a character who has a hard time getting a grasp on and producing some kind of meaning for his dispersed life – between here and there, between then and now. Suddenly trapped within the building where he spent his seemingly joyless childhood by overwhelming stories from neighbours, his claustrophobic experience is subtly yet masterfully transmitted by this brave cinematic decision. As a result, the verbally shared pieces of a common collective memory, metaphorically summed up and visually embodied by the appearance of a home video excerpt towards the end of the film, combat the amnesia of a nation, preoccupied with its physical survival in the here and now while abandoning its roots and its ancestors' memories. Such a premise confirms Vesnakov as perhaps the most profound thinker among contemporary Bulgarian filmmakers, and one who doesn’t hesitate to experiment with the film form in his search for the best means of expression to accompany his characters and ideas. 

Windless was produced by Bulgaria’s Red Carpet and was co-produced by Italy's dispàrte. World sales are handled by Alpha Violet.