The Desolating Stillness of Windless

In his second feature film Windless (winner of the FIPRESCI prize at the 29th Sofia International Film Festival), the director Pavel Vesnakov moves away from the raw realism of his earlier works to a more conceptually driven artistic approach, while staying true to the core themes that define his cinema: the harsh realities of life on the margins of Bulgarian society, the complex dynamics of father-son relationships amidst a crumbling patriarchal order, and the archetypal cycle of departure and return.

Windless is a poetic meditation on loneliness and the emptiness that emerges when the threads of memory are severed. Set against the backdrop of Bulgaria’s patriarchal traditions, the story portrays a cataclysmic rupture that fractures the bonds between generations. This uprooting creates a suffocating sense of stagnation: an inability to move forward, until, through understanding and forgiveness, those connections begin to heal.

A year after his estranged father’s death, Kaloyan is forced to return to his small hometown in Bulgaria to settle his modest inheritance – a rundown apartment filled with useless belongings, to which he feels indifferent (and his mother is outright disdainful of). Following her instructions over a video call from Spain, he clears out the apartment and burns nearly all the household items in the nearest dumpster. Meanwhile, the local authorities prepare to exhume his father’s remains, sealing them in a black bag to make way for a golf course set to replace the local cemetery.

This act serves as both a metaphor for the complete erasure of memory and a desecration of the past, while also feeling unsettlingly realistic within the Bulgarian social landscape. This context is deeply embedded in the film – not only through its inhabited spaces, visually reinforced by the film’s 1:1 aspect ratio, but also through the characters and their deeply ingrained patriarchal worldview.

The face tattooed on the back of the protagonist’s neck serves as a striking visual symbol, complemented by the discarded sculptural busts carried around, later captured in a surreal montage as they burn. These images bring multiple layers of meaning: they can be seen as an expression of vehement repudiation of the totalitarian regime that devastated these lands, or alternatively, as an allegory for destroying the figure of the father. The act of burning them becomes a symbolic gesture – an act of defiance, a direct challenge to the weight of an oppressive past and its lingering presence.

To enhance this atmosphere, the director drew inspiration from the remarkable work of one of the great minds of the 20th century – W. G. Sebald. His works are also imbued with a deep sense of sorrow and a certain hushed devastation lingering in the air, one that is difficult to rationalize in daily life. In his writing, there is an underlying presence of the unspoken collective guilt within German society over the Holocaust. In Windless, the backdrop is not filled with a tragedy of such immense proportions, yet somewhere in the corner of history looms the shadow of the hundreds of shattered and separated Bulgarian families who have left the country over the past 35 years after the falling of the Berlin Wall.

The film features mesmerizing cinematography that intricately captures the profound isolation of the human experience and the turbulence of inner emotions. Employing a richly metaphorical visual language, it delves into themes of absence, yearning, and the heavy burden of unexpressed feelings. By harnessing the power of silence, Windless transforms stillness into a deeply evocative reflection of desolation.

By Katerina Lambrinova

Edited by Savina Petkova

Copyright FIPRESCI