#7 * In “Before the Rain” Milcho was the victim of the Serb soldier, in “Dust” he was the mother of Luke and Elijah. Does this mean the following the segments of the poetics of Alfred Hitchkok and Orson Wells who has the habit to show themselves in some scenes of their films?
MM: Absolutely. Hitchkok originally invented this idea, and I just do a different variant of that – I appear only in photos (he laughs). Those are photos that play quite an important role in my films. In “Before the Rain” the photo was important because that was the embryo of the whole film’s action; that was the moment when Alexander decided to go back to Macedonia. In “Dust”, at the other hand, the photo of the Luke’s and Elijah’s mother is probably the oldest photo in the whole of Angela’s collection. They both started from their mother, as characters with their relationships towards the females. It’s a playing, again. I do think that when someone does art, he should lay a lot – and he should be killing himself with work, at the same time. That someone must be consequent and free at the same time, and that is my greatest engagement when I make a film.. How to play and to be responsible towards the team and the colleagues, how to bring the invested money back after finishing the film, etc…
* Both “Before the Rain” and “Dust” start with the tomatoes and end with the quite alike scenes with the skies, clouds, and in analogy, somehow, the birds. Often, unintentionally, I name “Dust” – The second Part of “Before the Rain”. Can we talk, at all, about some essential link among them, or maybe about some kind of trilogy?
#8 MM: There probably is a trilogy, but the third film still hasn’t revealed to me. I assume that my third film would be extraordinary simple – an “aerodynamic” one. The first one has three defined stories, the second has, in essence – two stories, and by some analogy, the third one should have only one. Otherwise, the appearance of the tomatoes is very interesting. I had a production professor who was always saying “the first scene defines your film”, and my father, then again, was saying that by the titles’ music at the beginning of the film can recognize whether the film be god or bad, and even what the film will be – in general. When I did my thinking about the beginning of “Before the Rain”, I did ask myself what’s the most typical thing in this country. I did conclude that the tomatoes are the one of the few things with what Macedonia is superior than any other country, or area. In the second film, the question was how to do that again, but in N.Y. It seemed very logical that those tomatoes from the “Before the Rain” arrived at the market in America.
* Whatever is the way of presenting the Macedonians, Albanians, Turks, Americans, English – in both of your films, the soldiers, the flies, the sheep, and the guns… in both films they are one and the same. We would be unfair if we say that the cry for cosmopolitanism and for respect for the Other, wins in your films. Can that be linked in the relation with the general process of globalization, or that’s your personal determination as an artist and as a human, above all?
MM: Humanism, not globalism. In fact, that’s absolutely firm humanistic and pacifistic ideas and I stand 100% that the people are everywhere, that they have the same loves and sufferings, same problems, deceits, same evil… All that depends on the man, and on the moment. If we go back for the third time to Venice, this may be the fourth reason what bothered some of them. About that speaks Marija Todorova in her book Imagining the Balkans. It’s s syndrome by which every racism projects upon the others, far away, on some cannibals in the Balkans. May be, with my offer of the very opposite, I did disturb their racist’s koncept. There was a situation when some journalist defined “Dust” as a racist film. The same one was the member of the paramilitary organizations in Northern Ireland. So even this humanism is never an fully intentional thesis, my authorial credo is that we are all humans, and that there always will be good and bad ones among us. The issue is how you will tell the story about it…
Translated by: Petar Volnarovski