Winter Slaap
2023 · 29m · South Africa
Directed by Leandros Braounos, Daniel Howells
Genres: drama, fantasy, historical
Tones: contemplative, melancholic, surreal
During a never-ending winter, an old man descends from a mountain into the valley of oblivion. There he stumbles upon two sisters who live amidst ruin and search for any sign of salvation.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
Everyone's going to call this a fairy tale, but Braounos and Howells are doing something weirder—stripping the narrative down to pure mythic gesture, which means it either transcends or collapses depending on your tolerance for ambiguity, and honestly I'm not sure which yet.
A deliberate exercise in visual austerity and tonal restraint that positions itself squarely in the lineage of Northern European folk cinema; the 29-minute duration and the descent structure invoke both Bresson's compositional discipline and the moral allegory of classical mythology.
The choice to hold on the sisters' faces in near-total stillness while the landscape shifts around them—that's the whole film right there, turning what could've been ponderous into something genuinely uncanny on a shoestring sensibility.