Culture: Republic of Macedonia
6 December, 2001

Dust of Milco Manchevski is an impressive work from all points of view. Among the best movies in the last ten years. Extraordinary and rarely complex movie. Work that refuses to fit in the clichés for what has been considered "Balkan" or "European author’s movie" from one hand, and "Hollywood movie" from the other. With its structure and essence Dust marks the birth of something new, managed to articulate the spirit of the new age, long ago before the world to be aware of it. It did that before September 11, when the images of the plains crashing in the World Trade Centre literally shown to us that the world has changed and it is never going to be the same that we knew.

Dust is a movie for a thief, Edge, who in nowadays New York would like to rob the gold of an one hundred years old woman, Angela, who will force him to listen to her story from the beginning of 20th century for the two cowboy brothers, Luke and Elijah, who will fall in love with the same girl, who will be cross to each other, and from American Wild West will come to the Balkan Wild East, among Turkish asker (soldiers) and komiti (Macedonian revolutionary guerrillas).

Dust is not only about two stories in two times and places that are being entwined, this is also a demonstration of the process of creation, of the form of narration, of the movie form as well. Or, as Venko Andonovski would say, "the movie is an appeal for aesthetic debate, for breaking the clichés". I saw "Dust" several times and I was always being touched to tears on the same spot: the scene when Angela, waking up from the nightmare, would ask herself: "Where does the voice go when you are gone?" I am excited by the issue of deepness, the ultimate and the beauty that it has. It is like haiku.

The movie has the feeling of joy from narrating stories-narrating because the beauty of the act itself, and then because the knowledge that the story brings-that everyone has his own story and could tell it the way he wants. And that the stories are what is being left when only the dust will remain from us. From there, the answer of Angela's question is: when you are gone, the voice does not go anywhere, it stays here, being taken over from another voice, and another, and another... That fact is entirely comforting. It has in itself perfect ontological optimism.

Manchevski manages in a master way to make a balance between what he says and how it say it. The movie simply reflects with perfect self-confidence and assurance of the author, with perfect command of the form, and especially the need to be broken, bent, disperse and to be created again. What is actually the essence of a piece.