It was hard just to get to the locations, many of them remote mountain areas inside Macedonia. SHOOTING THE FILM, which ultimately cost $2.5 million, with financing from several co-producers, was arduous. Manchevski's completed script was approved within days. ![]() He wants to enrich your eye, give you a feast in your ear." Mr. "So many writers come from theater or novels they're so word-based. "It was always a piece of poetry." He considered Mr. "It was a very topical story, but it wasn't a piece of realism," Mr. Simon Perry, British Screen's chief executive, read it, liked its originality and commissioned a script. "I thought it was too personal, too esoteric." Though he thought of it daily, the outline sat in the computer for a year and a half.įinally, a friend suggested sending it to British Screen, an organization that nurtures new talent by helping to underwrite films unlikely to attract sufficient commercial financing. "I was convinced I wasn't going to get funding," he explained. On his return to New York, he wrote an outline. Manchevski lives in the East Village in Manhattan, but he has dual citizenship and keeps the Skopje apartment where he spent his childhood.) The film grew out of a trip he made to his homeland in 1991. In fact, as he pointed out, Macedonia - a landlocked region that is now an independent country - is the one part of former Yugoslavia where political change has so far been nonviolent. Manchevski (his full name is pronounced meel-cho man-CHEVF-ski) stresses that his film is in no way a documentary. ![]() Its protagonists include Kiril (Gregoire Colin), a young Macedonian monk who has taken a vow of silence Zamira (Labina Mitevska), a desperate ethnic Albanian girl, and Anne (Katrin Cartlidge), a well-heeled English photo editor.Īt its core, though, it is the story of Aleksandar Kirkov (Rade Serbedzija), a London-based war photographer who returns to his native Macedonia to find his village divided into hostile camps, ethnic Macedonian against ethnic Albanian. Vividly photographed and told in three parts, its narrative structure is almost circular, ending where it began. "Before the Rain" is not an easy movie to characterize, or even to follow. ![]() It has won nearly a score of awards, including the Golden Lion (shared with another film) at the Venice Film Festival, and it will be shown tonight at the Sundance Film Festival, in Park City, Utah.Īlthough the movie doesn't open in theaters in the United States until next month, it has already made a celebrity of its director in Macedonia, which chose the picture as its first-ever entry for the Academy Award for best foreign language film. That film, a story of ethnic conflict set in London and Macedonia, has been shown at festivals in a half-dozen countries over the last five months. Then he made his first feature film, "Before the Rain." Not long ago he was leading a busy but manageable life as a New York-based director of music videos and commercials. The director, who is 35, had a lot to feel tired about. Manchevski was, if anything, more exhausted. Last week, sitting in the bar of the Rihga Royal Hotel in New York, a discreet gold stud in each ear, Mr. "But so tired it's sort of wearing off on the happiness," he said wistfully from the apartment in Skopje, Macedonia, where he grew up.
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