Before the rain milcho manchevski biography

It’s a recognizably portentous way to begin a war film: a field of farmers bent over stalks of tomato plants, picking their crop under a blazing sun. Viewers like myself, accustomed to Deer Hunters and Apocalypse Nows, will be primed for these peasants to be mowed down momentarily in a hail of machine gunfire. So often either the aggressors or bystanders of most global conflicts, American depictions of battle typically take the soldier’s eye view, getting down in the muck with all its stray bullets and airborne body parts. But in Before the Rain, director Milcho Manchevski withholds many of these maximalist markers of cinematic language to tell a more intimate story of brutality and loss. The violence that ripped through his home country Macedonia (now North Macedonia)—and neighboring Serbia and Bosnia-Herzegovina—in the early 90’s was not that long ago, but the images now coming to the U.S. from Ukraine have an eerie echo with them. There are some key differences between those earlier clashes and the current Russian invasion, and they shouldn’t be conflated in historical terms. But revisiting the cinema of these nations in this time can still be informative on the human scale, and Before the Rain remains one of the most potent examples. 

Oddly, the American film that Before the Rain shares the most D.N.A. with isn’t a war movie at all, but Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction, which also came out in 1994. While Tarantino deployed a fractured narrative mostly as a stylistic device to surprise and excite the viewer, Manchevski is using it to demonstrate what large-scale violence can do to a psyche. Told in three discrete but interlocking chapters, its Mobius-strip structure circles back on itself, characters and situations reflecting one another in ways that only become clear at the conclusion with some mysteries deliberately left unsolved. As a priest in part one says and graffiti in part two quotes: “Time never dies. The circle is not round.” 

This was Manchevski's first film, which won an award at the Venice Film Festival in 1994; his second is due to appear soon. (That is, assuming that he finds a distributor -- which was a problem with Before the Rain.) Manchevski's training is American, and he lives mainly in New York, but he has kept a foothold in Macedonia where he was born (in 1950, in Skopje) and raised. His themes and settings span East and West, but his sensibility comes from his homeland, and his driving impulse seems to be to explore the meanings of the Balkans' beauty and cruelty.

This film is presented in three episodes, the first and last of them set in the remote hill country of Macedonia, the other in London. The story-telling within each episode is immediately understandable (though not necessarily the implications of what has occurred). However, the ordering of the episodes has something "elegantly circular" about it, as one critic said; that is, the viewer cannot be entirely sure what happened before what. The purpose, surely achieved with most viewers, is to make us think. As Manchevski says, "I want the viewer to feel as people felt when they first saw a Cubist painting. I want them to put the puzzle together."

Whether or not you enjoy this kind of challenge to your grasp of the overall story, you will surely find the film exceptionally memorable visually. The landscape in which the monastery near the half-Slavic, half-Albanian village sits, overlooking Lake Ohrid or another Macedonian lake, is breath-taking. The faces will remain with you long afterwards, too. So, I fear, will the killing, though most of it is not graphic by Hollywood standards.

It's worth thinking about an implicit warning contain

written by Ajla Medanhodzic

Before the Rain is an award-winning debut feature about love and war directed and written by New York-based Macedonian director Milcho Manchevski in 1994. The film obscures the line between art cinema and commercial cinema, simultaneously exceeding the boundaries of ethnic and nationalist cinema. It is one of the first films that international art cinema audiences associated with the term Macedonian cinema.

Before the Rain, a co-production between England, France, and Macedonia, gives the context for the war stories arriving from the Balkans region (Ebert). Made in the early ’90s, it aims to capture the atmosphere of the conflict in former Yugoslavia and interpret it for the international audience. For the local and regional audience, it represented a cautionary tale warning about the dangers if the war in the Balkans reached the Republic of Macedonia. Up until the beginning of the war, the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia consisted of six republics that were seeking independence. At the time, Macedonia was the only Balkan state where war did not occur.

Manchevski explained the story was inspired by the events in Yugoslavia, but it was not intended to be as much about those events specifically as it was about the universal struggles of people in any country engulfed by destructive events such as wars.

The circular storyline explores the ethnic conflict between Orthodox Christian Macedonians and the Albanian Muslim minority through a non-linear three-part structure. The segments are titled Words, Pictures, and Faces, and even though they are set in different timelines and multiple locations, they form a singular story connected by characters and themes.

One of the recurring messages in the film, “Time never dies. The circle is not round,” appears throughout the narrative in dialogue or as graffiti on a building. It de