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Andrey Paounov’s opaque but arresting feature turns on mysterious disappearances and wolfish arrivals in a deep dark forest

Here’s a bitter, odd, quirky shaggy-dog ghost story with a wintry chill. Award-winning Bulgarian documentary film-maker Andrey Paounov makes his fiction feature debut with this adaption, along with British co-writer Alex Barrett, from a stage play by Bulgarian author Yordan Radichkov. Two middle-aged men are shivering in a remote snowy hut just on the border of a dark forest full of wolves. They are the Porter (Samuel Finzi) and the Old Man (Iossif Surchadzhiev), and they are … what? Forest rangers? Officials at a science research station? A third resident, Petar, has gone into town earlier, taking with him the horse-and-sled and his rifle.

While Petar is away, a sinisterly threatening man (Zachary Baharov) shows up with another man whose face is obscured by scarves, demanding help with his damaged snow plough.

Female ensemble-led work is second fiction feature of “demonic duo” behind Cat In The Wall.

Paris-based mk2 films has acquired world sales rights for Bulgarian directorial duo Mina Mileva and Vesela Kazakova’s new film Women Do Cry exploring Bulgaria’s complicated relationship with issues of gender and gender-based violence and featuring Borat 2 co-star Maria Bakalova in the cast.

The drama revolves around a family of women united by a shared trauma who confront the family patriarch’s troubling past, against the backdrop of anti-gender and anti-equality protests in Bulgaria.

It is Mileva and Kazakova’s second fiction feature...