In snowy January, two men and a bird in a remote mountain cottage complex are greeted by a series of strange guests. Each one seeks an audience with Petar Motorov, the residence’s owner, who has disappeared in the woods with his sleigh. Then his horse brings back the sleigh minus its owner, but carrying instead a dead, frozen wolf. As various members of the group make their own journey into the mountains, the sleigh continues to bring back eerie, stiff wolves in the place of human drivers. What is going on? And is Petar Motorov ever coming back?

An international co-production, January presents an unusual proposition on paper: a black-and-white absurdist tale, with folk horror leanings, by a Bulgarian director who’s previously only made documentaries, and co-written with a British filmmaker who’s veered between fiction and nonfiction. Andrey Paounov (Walking on Water, 2018) is the director, with his co-writer being Alex Barrett, whose last feature was the modern silent film London Symphony (2017). Together they reinterpret Yordan Radichkov’s allegorical play of the same name for a universal audience. But, as the above synopsis may indicate, that doesn’t mean they’ve made it any less weird…

Full interview for the BFI