Few debuts cast a longer shadow than Before the Rain. Milcho Manchevski’s first feature won Venice’s Golden Lion and an Oscar nomination, making a North Macedonian director an international name overnight. His new film reaches the Tokyo International Film Festival competition carrying a different kind of history: by his account, it sat frozen for years after he accused his country’s Film Agency of corruption.

As Variety reports, Sister Brother Manhole Cover is a dark comedy about Malina and Viktor, siblings scraping by in post-Communist Macedonia by stealing bronze busts of national heroes and manhole covers to sell the metal. When a job leaves Viktor seriously hurt, Malina cuts a deal with a crooked doctor; the pair end up on the run and take shelter with the doctor’s wealthy mother, Todora, who is blind.

“I wanted to tell a story about a kind of love that is rarely at the center of films, yet it is so beautiful: the love between a brother and a sister,” he tells Variety. He refuses to make them objects of pity: “Poverty is not picturesque. It is painful and dehumanizing.” The busts stand for the values a society claims to honor while it abandons people like Malina and Viktor, and the manhole covers, he says, “keep a lid on the ugliness of society, on its septic underground.”

The whistleblowing is not subtext. “‘Sister Brother Manhole Cover’ was blocked for years after it was financed. After I reported corruption at the Film Agency that goes all the way up to the Prime Minister, I faced political harassment, a media smear campaign and criminal proceedings,” Manchevski says. He says he won two court cases against the agency and that the State Commission for Prevention of Corruption and the State Audit Office confirmed his account, with the Venice Film Festival, Whistleblowing International and Transparency International backing him. Once the blockade lifted, he shot the feature alongside Good People, a documentary about those affected by the Kočani nightclub fire.

He aims his sharpest phrase beyond his own case. “Many festivals and (European) film funds have abdicated their role in promoting and boosting brave films,” he says. “This ecosystem is complicit in the death of beauty in contemporary cinema.” The film is a co-production of North Macedonia, Bulgaria, Serbia, Albania, Italy and the U.K., produced by Jane Kortoshev for Banana Film. Sara Klimoska and Filip Trajkovikj lead the cast; Coccinelle Film handles world sales.

Tokyo is familiar ground: this is Manchevski’s fourth visit to the festival, and his previous feature, Kaymak, played in competition there in 2022. Before the Rain dates from 1994; his credits since include Dust, which opened Venice in 2001, and an episode of HBO’s The Wire. Next up is Homecoming, a story about regret and forgiveness.

On screen, two siblings pry loose the lids that hide a society’s septic underground. Off screen, the director spent years fighting the agency that froze the film, and the result now plays in competition in Tokyo.