Milcho Manchevski, the Before the Rain director who took on Macedonia’s film agency

Milcho Manchevski

Photo: Pmm1112 / CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	October 18, 1959 Skopje, North Macedonia
Occupation	Film director and screenwriter
Awards	Golden Lion (shared) · FIPRESCI Prize, Venice Film Festival · Independent Spirit · Best Director, Raindance Film Festival

On the opening night of the Tokyo festival, Milcho Manchevski walked the red carpet under a replica manhole cover, flanked by the cast of Sister Brother Manhole Cover, a dark comedy about two siblings who steal bronze busts of national heroes and sell the metal for scrap. The prop was a joke. The film behind it was not: by his own account it sat frozen for years, financed and unable to shoot, after the director whose debut once served abroad as proof that a newly independent Macedonia had a cinema accused that country’s Film Agency of corruption.

Every film he has made since has been measured against Before the Rain, the triptych that travels from a Macedonian monastery to a London photo agency and back, which won the Golden Lion in Venice and earned an Academy Award nomination. Manchevski has spent three decades declining to make it again, and his own country has spent the last few years treating him less like its most decorated filmmaker than like a nuisance.

Manchevski grew up in Skopje, then part of Yugoslavia, where he was born on 18 October 1959, and studied at Ss. Cyril and Methodius University before crossing to Southern Illinois University, where he graduated in film and photography in 1982. New York became home after film school. The experimental short 1.73 came first, then a run of music videos, among them Arrested Development’s Tennessee, which won an MTV award and later landed on Rolling Stone’s list of the 100 best videos ever made.

Before the Rain arrived in 1994 as the first feature shot in independent Macedonia, with Katrin Cartlidge, Rade Šerbedžija, Grégoire Colin and Labina Mitevska in a story built as a circle that refuses to close. Venice gave it the Golden Lion, shared that year with Tsai Ming-liang’s Vive L’Amour, along with the FIPRESCI prize; it went on to an Independent Spirit Award and a nomination for Best Foreign Language Film at the Oscars. The New York Times later put it on its list of the best 1,000 films ever made. For a director in his mid-thirties, it was a starting point that doubled as a ceiling.

Dust is where the canonized story and the actual career part ways. The 2001 film, a Western set partly in Ottoman-era Macedonia with Joseph Fiennes, David Wenham and Adrian Lester, opened the Venice festival and was mauled there. The Evening Standard’s Alexander Walker called it racist; other critics read it as a partisan comment on the armed conflict then under way in Macedonia, even though shooting had finished before the fighting began. Manchevski answered later that the film spared nobody, Macedonians, Albanians, Turks, Greeks and Americans alike. The flaws were real enough: Variety’s David Stratton judged it too arty for action audiences and too bloody for the art house. But the damage came from the timing of a political reading more than from the cut, and Dust never received the distribution a Golden Lion winner’s second film would normally command; Lionsgate gave it only a limited American release in 2003.

Between features he directed “Game Day”, a first-season episode of HBO’s The Wire, and then turned back toward home. Shadows, in 2007, and Mothers, in 2010, which blended fiction with documentary and screened in the Berlinale’s Panorama, were both submitted by Macedonia to the Academy. In the same years he shot Macedonia Timeless, a series of tourism spots for the government of Nikola Gruevski that drew a line from Alexander the Great’s ancient kingdom to the modern republic. It is an awkward entry for a filmmaker who would later describe himself as a target of that state’s politics, and it complicates the picture of an outsider who never courted official favour.

The later work grew stranger and more personal. Bikini Moon, in 2017, was made in English in New York. Willow, about three women and the fight over who controls their bodies, opened the Rome Film Festival in 2019, became Macedonia’s Oscar entry and earned him the best director award at Raindance. Kaymak premiered in competition at Tokyo in 2022 and sold more than 16,000 tickets in North Macedonia, a solid figure in a small market.

Then the fight began. In 2023 Manchevski said he had reported corruption at the Film Agency and the Association of Filmmakers and that political persecution followed: the agency blocked the finished Kaymak, froze the project then called Leaving Copacabana, and pro-government outlets ran a smear campaign while criminal complaints were filed against him that, he said, a Ministry of Culture inspection had already found baseless. Venice director Alberto Barbera signed an open letter backing him. Speaking to Variety this autumn, Manchevski said he had won two court cases against the agency and that the State Commission for Prevention of Corruption and the State Audit Office had confirmed his account.

When the blockade lifted, he shot Leaving Copacabana, now retitled Sister Brother Manhole Cover, alongside Good People, his first feature-length documentary. That film gives the survivors and families of the March 2025 fire at the Pulse nightclub in Kočani, which killed more than sixty young people, the camera to themselves, with no narration and no score; he and his producers and distributors waived their profits in favour of the victims. It premiered in the documentary competition of the Sarajevo Film Festival in August 2026.

Sister Brother Manhole Cover, starring Sara Klimoska and Filip Trajkovikj and produced by Jane Kortoshev for Banana Film, is a six-country co-production and his fourth trip to Tokyo. “Poverty is not picturesque. It is painful and dehumanizing,” he told Variety, and he widened the charge beyond his own case: “This ecosystem is complicit in the death of beauty in contemporary cinema.”

Away from the set, Manchevski holds dual citizenship and divides his life between New York and Skopje. He headed directing studies at NYU’s Tisch graduate film program, has taught at Brooklyn College’s Feirstein school, and has published fiction, including The Ghost of My Mother, as well as books of photographs.

The festival hands out its prizes when it closes on 4 November. After that comes Homecoming, which he describes as a story about regret and forgiveness, an unexpected subject for a director who has spent the last three years refusing to let anything go.

Tags: Before the Rain, Milcho Manchevski, Sister Brother Manhole Cover, Dust, Joseph Fiennes, Katrin Cartlidge