Windless

Bezvetrije

Still from Windless (2024)
Film Servis Festival Karlovy Vary

VERDICT: A son returns to Bulgaria from abroad to settle the affairs of his estranged father in this confined drama about confronting the past and the act of memorial.

The past is a stifling place for the protagonist of Pavel G. Vesnakov’s sophomore feature, Windless.

Forced to return to his rundown hometown in Bulgaria having long since moved to Spain with his mother, Kaloyan (Ognyan Pavlov, otherwise known as the rapper “FYRE”) is less than overjoyed to be there. He is visiting to handle his father’s affair in the wake of his death, primarily the clearance and sale of his flat. When in an early scene someone asks Kaloyan why he wasn’t at his father’s funeral, his sullen silence tells us all we need to know about the state of their relationship – we later learn they hadn’t spoken in more than a year. While dutiful in making the trip back, he evidently finds the place oppressive, his childhood memories the catalyst for a brick wall built to keep them at bay. It’s this experience Vesnakov captures acutely in Windless, which premieres in the Proxima Competition of this year’s Karlovy Vary Film Festival. It’s an experience of being railroaded into reckoning with your past and having to wrestle with questions of if and how we honour it.

Kaloyan is a moody and reflective individual and Vesnakov embraces these characteristics to create the milieu of the entire film. This is the world as seen by the protagonist – from the muted coolness of the colour-palette to the notable 1:1 shooting ratio. We’ve seen that same boxy aesthetic used to convey a psychological claustrophobia in the past, most notably in Xavier Dolan’s Mommy, and it is similarly effective here. It makes the world feel incredibly tight around Kaloyan. Each thing he interacts with that brings back unwanted memories fill the screen, as if he is being challenged by it, face on.

What is perhaps most interesting about this dynamic in Windless is that the memories being presented to Kaloyan are diametrically opposed to his own and so the tension comes not from the external stimuli but from our inference of the character’s emotional state. Almost every person that discusses Kaloyan’s father, Asen, in the film does so with a sense of reverence and depth of emotion that his own son long ago discarded. Old comrades speak of his bravery and self-lessness, friends of his compassion and sense of duty to his family, others of his overwhelming generosity of spirit. The whole film is punctuated with anecdotes that create a portrait of a much-loved and respected man who was selfless to a fault. It is a testament to Vesnakov’s skill as a filmmaker and Pavlov’s impressive performance, that we feel a tightness in our gut at such kind words.

These conversations form a recurring motif in the film’s structure, with Kaloyan confronted by a variety of people – typically of his father’s generation or older – who either reminisce specifically about Asen or provide a broader context to the town in which Kaloyan was born and his father spent his life. With each one Kaloyan has another perspective to challenge or reinforce the one he already holds, of a town that offers few prospects and a father who never loved him. Late on, he tells his friend (Veselin Petrov) about overhearing his father once say that you should only ever kiss your child while they are asleep. Asen’s tough love approach seems to have had more of an impact on his son that he could have imagined.

Between these conversations, the two friends rove around while Kaloyan waits for the money from the sale to clear. He helps out with odd jobs, doing rubbish clearances that are the result of a new casino and highway development that is seen as progress and opportunity by some and the destruction of a community by others. One such development involves the cemetery meaning that Kaloyan must arrange for the removal of the bodies of his father and grandparents. At the film’s beginning, he wants this sorted with as little input from himself as possible, but as he sees the disregard with which people are treating the past, and he comes to have a nuanced view of his own, this gradually shifts. Films about homecomings and coming-of-age are all about arriving at new perspectives and this is absolutely Windless’s central arc. Pavlov doesn’t necessarily change the outward demeanour of his performance, but it seems to innately soften as he sees both the town and father he was thankful to have left behind with fresh eyes. In what is a quiet and understated film, it makes for a hugely compelling watch.

Director: Pavel G. Vesnakov
Cast: Ognyan Pavlov – “FYRE”, Veselin Petrov, Mihail Mutafov, Nadya Derderyan, Lidia Vulkova, Konstantin Trendafilov, Vasil Binev,
Producer: Veselka Kiryakova
Screenplay: Pavel G. Vesnakov, Simeon Ventsislavov, Teodora Markova, Nevena Kertova, Georgi Ivanov
Cinematography: Orlin Ruevski
Editing: Victoria Radoslavova
Music: Ascari
Production design: Severina Stoyanova
Costume design: Marieta Spasova
Production company: Red Carpet (Bulgaria), disparte (Italy)

Venue: Karlovy Vary International Film Festival (Proxima Competition)
In Bulgarian
93 minutes

Read more of the team’s coverage of KVIFF 2024.