VLACH REQUIEM

Pepi, the last resident of the village of Kanitz in northern Bulgaria, wants to send off his abandoned village like a real person. With the help of Spiro, a local funeral driver, and the last Vlach brass band in the region, he begins preparing a final send-off for Kanitz with music, according to Vlach funeral rites. The Vlachs are a minority spread across Bulgaria, Serbia, and Romania, whose funeral customs blend Orthodox faith with older pagan beliefs about the dead, the soul, and the afterlife. Through this journey, the film follows not only Pepi’s goodbye to his village, but the long-foretold death of a whole way of life. Pepi, Spiro, and the musicians all once belonged to the seemingly ordered socialist world whose remains they now move through. As they move through villages, rituals, and memories, the film enters a territory where the living and the dead, ritual and ruin, villages and ghosts exist side by side.