JANUARY

An abandoned-looking Brutalist hotel complex rots away in Bulgaria's Northeast, blanketed by snow. Alas, it's not entirely vacant – a security guard and an old man pass the short days there with crossword puzzles and cracking nuts. A crow with a fondness for rakiya keeps them company. When the generator in the basement is being cooperative, the unlikely crew raises lobsters in the former hotel rooms. But where did a certain Petar Motorov head off to anyways? Not into the woods after all? The fresh snow might already have covered his tracks again... Suddenly strangers show up, asking uncomfortable questions. Suspicion is in the air. Slowly, the film pulls us ever deeper into a world of the undead, frozen wolves and fabulous figures, surrounded by a forest from which no one returns the way they went in, at least not in January. Based on a play by Yordan Rachikov, Andrey Paounov's film employs horror and thriller tropes and unmistakeable allusions to Stanley Kubrick's THE SHINING to tell a contemporary story about those who live outside cities, whose time seems long gone.