Jelena Sofronijevic
Premiering in the UK as part of the Barbican’s New East Cinema Season, January is a new film from Bulgarian director Andrey Paunov. Jelena Sofronijevic spoke to its writer, Alex Barrett, and the curator of New East Cinema, Teodosia Dobriyanova, at the Barbican.
Alex Barrett is the screenwriter of the surreal Bulgarian mystery. It traverses the purgatory between life and death, past and present, communism and capitalism.
Teodosia Dobriyanova is the curator of New East Cinema (NEC) at the Barbican, a London-based collective working to deliver the most recent and exciting auteur-driven cinema from the New East to the UK as a means of alternative distribution.
Alex Barrett Interview
January is an adaptation of Yordan Radichkov’s 1974 short story and play about five men stuck in a cabin in the woods during a snowstorm. Radichkov was a Nobel Prize Nominee, and one of Bulgaria’s most adapted playwrights, but where did you both first come across the story?
“When [director] Andrey was eight years old, his mom took him to see the play. I think it was the first play that he had seen, and then he had this strange memory of it almost being a horror-slasher film. I think it kind of terrified him, and so all these years later, he said he just kept thinking about it and thinking about it and he knew that he wanted to do that as his first film.
The team knew they needed another writer to come on board to help shape the material into a film. I’m British, and I wasn’t familiar with the text or Bulgarian work in general, so it was a bit of a crash course. Luckily, it had been translated into English, there was a version that I could read, and then I spent a week with Andrey in Sofia, and he kind of fired all these ideas at me like a machine gun. We’d sit there all day, from ten in the morning to ten at night.”
Beyond the monochrome cinematography, we see portraits of Marx, Lenin, Brezhnev abandoned in the basement along with old badminton racquets, ghosts like The Shining twins, but dressed as Bulgarian Communist Pioneers. When is the Bulgaria of January, and what does it say about Bulgaria today?
“I think this is something that we would not want to answer explicitly; when we were adapting it, we were as much adapting Andrey’s memory of seeing the play when he was eight, as we were the text, and perhaps this doesn’t play quite so well to an English audience. The building itself is an old socialist hotel that was built for workers, which has now obviously kind of fallen into disuse. So I think that you could interpret, if you so wished, that it’s kind of set in the present date, not so much in a contemporary landscape, but in a dream landscape.”
The harsh, wintery woods are contrasted with ‘the city’, a place where people don’t eat because they’re hungry, or hats because they’re cold. Tell me about filming.
“when they shot the final shot, it was minus 20 degrees”
“The film was shot on location in the Bulgarian Mountains. Andrey comes from a documentary background and so he was very keen to really have that reality to it, rather than building the interior in the studio in Sofia. He was adamant that they would shoot in the mountains and all the actors would be freezing; when they shot the final shot, it was minus 20 degrees.
But weirdly, it didn’t really snow that year. You know, every year in January, it’s always flooded with snow, but I guess it’s climate change. It’s 18 degrees in Sofia at the moment. 90% of the snow in the film is made by the art department and the production designers, which was not expected.”
Both you and Andrey (Georgi and the Butterflies, The Boy Who Was A King) have a strong background in documentary-making. What why turn to fiction?
“there are certainly constraints with filmmaking”
“There are certainly constraints with filmmaking. You are kind of confined by the facts as they present themselves by the reality of the situation. And if you step into fiction, then it allows you to open a door into the subconscious, the abstract, the absurd in a way that you can’t necessarily do with factual material.”
Humour here is used to articulate more existential absurdities in post-socialist Bulgaria. Another ghost is Peter Todorov, for whom all the characters are waiting to arrive. You’ve spoken about the influence of Samuel Beckett on the film, do you see this a particularly Bulgarian story, or something more transnational, European?
“I would hope that it has a universal aspect to it, and I think that that was one of the reasons why Andrey was keen to work with a writer from outside of Bulgaria. You can very much read it on a post-socialist level, or an an abstract, surrealist level. I think that that’s a case with a lot of Eastern European cinema. Polish, Romanian, and Czech waves have made those films fairly well known over here, things like Valerie and Her Week of Wonders, and I think they all play on slightly different levels to British audiences and post-socialist audiences.
“it would be nice if following this we got to see other Bulgarian cinema”
There’s very little Bulgarian cinema over here in the UK and it feels like other eastern European countries have had that moment in the spotlight. One of the fascinating things for me about working on this project was that I got to engage with a new culture that isn’t so well known over here. It would be nice if following this we got to see some other Bulgarian cinema, and people open to trying it out.”
Teodosia Dobriyanova Interview
How did January come to be part of NEC at the Barbican?
“The first time I heard about the film was in 2017, when it was very much in the making, and I was interviewing Alex [Barrett], the screenwriter, about another of his films, London Symphony. He didn’t tell me much more at the time, but I was paying close attention to the film news and when the film was announced, I was very curious to see it. So I’ve been effectively looking for it. I think January is something that you don’t see very often in Bulgarian cinema and I really wanted to show something that is genre-defying and mood-driven.”
Amongst those who appear at the cabin are wolves who are ‘too big for these parts’ (must be Romanian or Moldovan), and a rakia-drinking crow, reminding me that Bulgarian and Serbian languages share the same words for alcohols and animals. Have you noticed other connections between Balkan cultures in curating the series?
“that seems like an artificial conflict”
“Yes! We share so much, like Slavic languages, and we were part of the Ottoman Empire, so we share that past. In some ways now, I see politicians in Bulgaria trying create hostility where there isn’t, for example between Bulgaria and Macedonia, but if you speak to people, that seems like an artificial conflict. So I think we are way more similar than we are different.”
The New East refers to countries from Eastern Europe, the Balkans, and Central Asia, and these films often navigate what ‘post-socialism’ and ‘post-communism’ looks like their particular contexts. What are some of the differences you’ve noticed in the series and taken together, how do such differences challenge monoliths like ‘communism’ or ‘the Soviet Union’?
“I think very often the world has this idea that we’re talking about the same place. But in many ways it’s a patchwork of cultures, identities, languages, histories. I think cinema as a visual medium is the best way to get someone immersed in a place.
Films don’t necessarily need to tackle and so-called ‘post-Soviet’ themes; sometimes the lack of is also a comment, right? Because we also have a present and we have a future, and we are not all necessarily tied to that past. Andrey subtly explores of Bulgaria’s communist past; there are definitely lots of hints, but what I really like is that it’s not spelled out. It’s there for your interpretation.”
How can cinema help to tackle the misrepresentation and mystification of this diverse region?
“the more films you watch, the broader understanding you get of the region and its diversity”
“One of the things about working with contemporary directors is that they show their point of view, and I think the younger people are sometimes less connected to that past, depending on the country. But regardless of whether they have lived that past or not, I think every film and every filmmaker has their own unique point of view and their own unique perspective and way to see their world. I guess it’s like putting puzzle pieces together, and the more films you watch, the broader understanding you get of the region and its diversity.”
January premiered as part of New East Cinema at the Barbican in London, and is showing across the UK from 27 January 2023.
Featured image courtesy of Alex Morris, Alternate Current. No changes have been made to this image.
Jelena Sofronijevic
Jelena Sofronijevic (@jelsofron) is an audio producer and freelance journalist, who makes content at the intersections of intercultural political history and the arts. They are the producer of EMPIRE LINES, a podcast which uncovers the unexpected flows of empires through artworks, and historicity, a new series of audio walking tours which explore how cities got to be the way they are - starting with London.