A square frame, the old 1:1 ratio nobody shoots in anymore, pressed tight around a shaven head covered in tattoos. That’s the first thing you notice about Windless, and Pavel G. Vesnakov chose it on purpose. The box crowds his protagonist, traps him at the edges, lets the crumbling Bulgarian countryside slip by half-seen through a truck’s flapping tarp. The form is the feeling. A man comes home to a country that no longer fits him, and the screen itself refuses to give him room.
Vesnakov has spent his whole career chasing one thing. He can name it in a sentence he wrote more than a decade ago.
The Sentence He Wrote at Twenty-Five
Marcus opens by reading him a quote: realism is the most magical thing in cinema, and the simplest things are the hardest to express. Vesnakov recognizes it instantly. It’s him, from an interview around 2013, given after he won the Grand Prix at Clermont-Ferrand for his short film. He’s been saying the same thing for over a decade.
There is nothing more magical than reality. The simplest things are always the most difficult to express.
What’s striking is that he didn’t start there. As a young filmmaker in Sofia he was drunk on form. He chased the highly conceptual, mystical register of Peter Greenaway, early David Lynch, Tarkovsky, and Parajanov. He tried to copy-paste that style into short films on a tiny budget and got, by his own blunt assessment, disastrous results. The turn came from two films. Andrea Arnold’s Oscar-winning short Wasp pointed the way. Then Lance Hammer’s Ballast, the rough, music-free American indie that won at Sundance around 2009, broke it open. After Ballast he could finally imagine telling a small, natural story set in his own society, his own hometown. He still calls it his favorite film in that mode.
The Korean Film That Started It
Push back further, to the very beginning, and you reach a single night in 2007. Vesnakov was eighteen, fresh out of high school, in his first year studying cinema. He watched Kim Ki-duk’s 3-Iron, the South Korean drama about a near-silent drifter who lives in strangers’ empty homes. It floored him. He was discovering, for the first time, what visual language could do as a medium separate from literature. It was metaphysical and poetic and realistic all at once. To this day he says he doesn’t understand how you make a film like that.
He didn’t come from a film family. The path opened by accident. He was the only kid in his school with a camera, an old SVHS machine his father bought. A class assignment to make a greeting for the teachers turned, in his hands, into a dark video essay about meaningless existence and why school drives young people to despair. The audience received it badly. But his literature teacher stopped him on the street afterward. She asked whether he’d thought about studying to be a film director, something he hadn’t known was even possible. One sentence from one teacher pivoted the whole path. He’d been preparing to study history.
Why Realism
For Vesnakov, realism isn’t an aesthetic preference; it’s almost a moral one. He wants to capture the mundane, authentic texture of ordinary life without excessive stylization. He’s drawn to the daily struggles of people a little below the middle class, the kind he built his whole short-film cycle around. His characters live in the suburbs of Sofia, in collapsing families and money trouble, on the edge of getting by. The suburbs fascinate him because they sit between the rural and the city, the in-between ground where the real stuff happens.
He found his deepest confirmation in the Romanian New Wave, which he rates as the best in the artistic world alongside Iranian cinema. He points to Cristi Puiu’s The Death of Mr. Lazarescu and the Palme d’Or winner 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days. These are realist films that follow ordinary people, critique bureaucratic cruelty, and carry the weight of the communist past. He’s blunt about who that work is for, too. The people living those lives don’t want to watch them, he says; only the artists need to get it out of their system. The ordinary audience wants distraction, and he doesn’t resent them for it. He notes the painful irony too. When that Romanian film won the Palme d’Or, it was a box-office disaster at home. A Bulgarian Cannes title once had distributors asking the director to strip the festival’s logo off the poster. Audiences would assume it was slow and dark and stay away.
What the TV Years Taught Him
The realism deepened during a forced detour. After getting feature funding around 2014, Vesnakov waited five or six years to actually shoot. Funding chaos and corruption at the national film center stalled him. He calls it missing his moment. But he’s clear-eyed about what the gap gave him. Had he made his debut on schedule, he says, it would have been a terrible film. Instead he became a father, changed how he lived, and spent the wait directing television, including one of the biggest series in Bulgaria.
Commercial TV taught him things art house never could. It let him experiment with genre and language. More than that, it cured him of being shy. Directing the most famous actors in the country every day for years leaves no room for it. The lasting gift was a kind of radar. He can’t always say what he wants, he explains. But now he immediately senses what he doesn’t want, and knows to stop and change course rather than wait and see.
A Frame Like a Mirror
Windless is where Vesnakov starts pushing past pure realism. It’s the first film where he used music, the first not shot entirely handheld. It’s a little more staged, a little more willing to intervene. The 1:1 frame came partly from TV burnout, wanting everything to stop looking the same, and partly from the story. The wide-angle lens shoots so close it reads like a portrait, with the action pushed to the edges. It owes a clear debt to László Nemes’s Son of Saul. Vesnakov names that film as a direct inspiration for how much you can tell by staying tight on a face and letting the rest happen off-frame.
The story underneath is quiet and universal. Kaloyan, played by the Bulgarian rapper FYRE, comes home to sell his dead father’s apartment. The bureaucratic errand cracks open into a reckoning with memory, time, and where he comes from. He left as a small child and barely remembers. Vesnakov drew the mood from a novel he loves, Anuk Arudpragasam’s A Passage North, a meditation on memory and time and lost relationships. What he wanted from the film was not importance but reflection.
You watch the cinema screen and you watch some kind of mirror. This is what I wanted to achieve.
That ambition surfaced one more time in an accident he embraced. While editing, his editor turned up a 1991 home video of her own family at a birthday. The colors of the walls happened to match the film exactly, as if shot for it. He folded the real footage in because it felt true. The full conversation roams through Kiarostami and Tarkovsky, the economics of art-house distribution, and Vesnakov’s plan to one day attempt the impossible and remake Stalker. He talks throughout like a man who has made peace with realism as a lifelong pursuit rather than a style.
