THE SUN IS RISING FROM THE WEST ON MACEDONIAN CINEMA

The director explores the evolution of Macedonian film, from its roots in the Yugoslav Black Wave to modern auteurs redefining national storytelling.

Sorry, just out of curiosity, where are you from?

Again, the ever-familiar question I've been hearing since I left my home country at the ripe age of thirty-four, my Eastern European accent still firmly etched in my tongue. This time, I’m in NYC, standing at the counter of a bagel shop on Lexington Ave, answering how I’d like my bagel toasted. Soon, I learn that the girl behind the counter is Romanian, and happily recognize the sound of our Balkan home in my pronunciation.

Before leaving Macedonia, I had never realized how much it was a part of who I was. Back home, I could be a former wedding photographer, a failed journalist, a film director giving an interview for our national TV channel, someone’s friend or someone’s foe, but beyond the border, I was, more than anything else, Macedonian.

Since moving out of Macedonia, I’ve found myself in conversations about the cinema of my home country more often than before. I soon learned that Macedonia is barely known outside our Balkan region, and our cinema is even more of a mystery. This has made me think about it in a more structured way, with a newfound curiosity about how we, Macedonians, build the story worlds in our films.

As a modern republic, Macedonia gained independence from Yugoslavia in 1991 through a peaceful referendum with an intelligently ambiguous question proposing “a sovereign and independent state of Macedonia, with a right to enter into any future alliance with the sovereign states of Yugoslavia.” This ambiguity likely kept Macedonia safe from the engulfing flames of the Yugoslav wars in the 1990s. That, and the fact that our population of barely 2 million never posed a threat to our neighbors.

As a newly independent country, Macedonia’s film history spans only thirty-three years, and I have lived through all of it—because, for Macedonian cinema, history is not that long.

In the early 1990s, we started off with a bang. Milcho Manchevski wrote and directed Before the Rain, a beautifully mystical exploration of time synchronicities between two worlds far apart: our homeland to the East, and London, the age-old capital of the West. With stunning depictions of rural Macedonian landscapes and sharp-witted dialogue, this film is significant for gently closing the chapter of Yugoslav influence and paving the path for an authentic Macedonian perspective.

Manchevski’s contemporaries and those slightly older, already established as filmmakers during Yugoslavia, had a hard time shaking off the influence of the Black Wave movement, which by the 1990s had already become a dated concept.

But first, what was the Yugoslav Black Wave? The term was originally a dismissive nickname coined in 1969 to describe national cinema that dealt with the dark side of the Yugoslav experience. Soon, it became a mark of distinction among avant-garde and counter-culture filmmakers in the socialist federation, who won international recognition for tackling once-taboo topics like sex, war, and social alienation with a distinctive dark humor. The Yugoslav Black Wave was hugely important in its time, as it boldly protested the censorship and authoritarianism of the socialist government. However, after the dissolution of Yugoslavia, it had served its purpose—a message some local filmmakers of the time seemed to miss.

That is why Before the Rain was such a breath of fresh air in our new republic. It came from a first-time Macedonian filmmaker who had studied in the USA. In the film, a character questions whether, even with the Yugoslav wars raging, there wasn’t more gun violence happening in the West—in Britain and the USA—and if so, what that says about the world we live in. In 1994, Macedonia won its first Oscar nomination for Best International Feature Film, putting the country on the map for filmmakers worldwide. To this day, as a filmmaker from Macedonia, I am often recognized through this film, which continues to pave the way in international film circles.

Prior to Before the Rain and its fresh take on Macedonia, few films have managed to challenge the default Orientalist view of the Balkans. While feature films struggled conceptually to break free from these topics, documentary and short films thrived. One notable figure in Macedonian documentary filmmaking was Biljana Garvanlieva, a director who fearlessly examined the country’s marginalized realities. Her documentary Seamstresses lays bare the unexpectedly harsh life of women wanting to be artists in a small Macedonian provincial town. Another standout documentary is Menka, a moving short by director Aljosha Simjanovski. Through the tale of a bear visiting an elderly couple in the Macedonian mountains, Simjanovski brings to light universal themes of the human-nature relationship and the impact of civilization on the environment. When the bear stops coming one morning, the couple is left to question who the true "beast" is.

This short film can be seen as a precursor to Macedonia’s second Academy Award nomination for the remarkable documentary Honeyland, directed by Tamara Kotevska and Ljubo Stefanov. In 2020, this film made history as the first documentary to be nominated for both Best International Feature Film and Best Documentary Feature at the Oscars. Through the lens of a beekeeper from a remote village, Honeyland became a powerful metaphor for humanity’s exploitation of nature and its devastating consequences.

The 2020s finally brought a shift in Macedonian feature films, breaking away from the rebel-without-a-cause tone that had lingered for decades. Goran Stolevski, a Macedonian filmmaker born and raised in Australia, returned to his homeland with a deeply personal exploration of being different, told through a hauntingly dark folktale You Won’t Be Alone.

As I conclude this brief introduction to Macedonian cinema, I realize that the most significant strides have been made by filmmakers with one foot in both worlds. Milcho Manchevski, Goran Stolevski, and Biljana Garvanlieva, to name a few, spent much of their lives abroad, in what is often politically labeled as "the West.". I wonder, is it because Macedonia is so small, where everyone knows each other, that it’s nearly impossible to maintain a critical perspective? Or is it a universal truth that only from the outside can one truly see their homeland? Whatever the reason, the stars of Macedonian filmmaking suggest that the sun is indeed rising from the West on Macedonian cinema.▮