Milcho Manchevski (Skopje, 18.10.1959) is a film director and screenwriter. He studied art history and archaeology at the Faculty of Philosophy in Skopje, then moved to the United States and graduated from the Faculty of Film and Photography at the University of Southern Illinois in 1983. Manchevski is the author of the book “My Mother’s Spirit”, published in New York, texts for the band Bastion, scripts for music videos and commercials, and also appears as an actor in several short films, in two Macedonian feature films and in one theater play. From 1985 to 1991 he worked in New York as a cameraman for documentary and special-purpose films, then as an editor of documentaries, assistant scriptwriter for industrial videos, assistant lighting designer and assistant director of music videos. Since 1994 he has collaborated as a director of projects for all seven Hollywood studios. In 1995, the Cinematheque of Bologna, Italy, organized the first retrospective of Manchevski. He has won several awards and recognitions, including: for the film BEFORE THE RAIN, a nomination for the highest film award, the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film, the Golden Lion for Best Film at the Venice Film Festival, then the Golden Charlie Award at the Mons Film Festival, Belgium, as well as the Grand Prix at the Festival of Festivals in Petrograd. For the film BEFORE THE RAIN, Milcho Manchevski has won the 11 October Award and many other awards and recognitions for his engagement in the art of cinema…
“In BEFORE THE RAIN, we enjoyed the beautifully and lucidly filmed story, framed in the ingeniously structured play of the film chronotope – in the temporal “figure eight” of the “circle” that “is not round”, reflecting on how much coincidence, as well as the trickster resourcefulness of this author, are, or are not, part of the film’s genius in general.
Then, in DUST we enjoyed and did mental gymnastics amidst the intellectual duality and trickster indeterminacy of the author and his authorial stance, in the sense of “I am serious – I am not serious”, postmodern or post-postmodern film writing. Wasn’t that right?
And now, with this third film of his, SHADOWS, our great film trickster – has finally realized the script that was one of his first scripts for a feature film, and which he had wanted to film for a long time, even before the aforementioned two films… And what do we see now in this film – when he finally filmed it?…”
(Excerpt from Petar Volnarovski’s essay, When there is – there is… but how? dedicated to the Macedonian film scene, Kinopis no. 35)
