By Zsofia Szilagyi

David Wenham and Joseph Fiennes, the two lead actors
photo: Dust Productions

Stavica — An old Macedonian village against a Wild West backdrop. Time has stopped here. This is where internationally acclaimed Macedonian director Milcho Manchevski shoots his latest film Dust, part of which takes place in this small town against a Wild West backdrop. Though the well-hidden location is only accessible by jeeps, government officials and the media have been regular visitors. After all, the director's first film, Before the Rain, played a primary role in creating an international name for Macedonia — now everyone wants to be there for the furthering of this identity.

As such, the movie is an important one for Macedonia. It represents the Balkans' past and present, circularity, interconnections, memory, and things forgotten. Under the rule of arms, two borders come together in a full circle: the Wild West of the United States and the Wild East of Europe. Set in present-day New York and turn-of-the-century Macedonia, the film offers a unique observation post and reproduces a painful part of Balkan history that was pushed into oblivion by later wars.

Dust is an artistic reconstruction of the time at the beginning of the century, when Macedonia was rampaged by around 200 various gangs and was on the front pages around the world," says Manchevski, who won over 30 film awards for Before the Rain — among them the Golden Lion of the Venice Film Festival — which was also nominated for Best Foreign Film at the Academy Awards in 1995.

What is Macedonia?

Before the Rain even became embroiled in a heated dispute between Greeks and Macedonians over Macedonia's name. The Greek-American community insisted that the film's country of origin should be the United Nations-given "Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia," (FYROM) which is how the country has continued to be officially recognized abroad. Manchevski threatened to boycott the 1995 Academy Awards ceremony over the issue, and in the end stood firm, declaring that his film would be referred to as a product of the "Republic of Macedonia," which is also what the government has been trying to push for at various international negotiating tables. Greeks protested the "M" word all over the world, saying that the country's claim the name of Macedonia, the same name of a Greek province, showed their neighbors had expansionist intentions. The two countries have not reached a final official settlement of the name dispute yet. However, the Council of Europe in April 2000 suggested that Macedonia should stick with FYROM, at least within the ranks of that organization.

With Before the Rain, the 40-year-old director became an important identity creator for Macedonia, since that was the first large-scale cultural product the country put out after gaining independence in 1991. It is now five years later and "the whole country wants Milcho to succeed," says Chris Auty, the film's British producer. "For some of the British crew here, it is hard to believe the extent of Milcho's public visibility and the jealousy that it leads to."

Dust will be the first big-screen production that deals with the ethnic-cleansing-ridden part of Macedonian history that preceded the first Balkan war of 1912. Manchevski wrote the script in 1995 and took inspiration from the 1914 Carnegie report, which was put together by a group of international diplomats, journalists, and lawyers investigating the atrocities in the Balkans before the Ottoman Empire was pushed out.

The Carnegie report somewhat resembles the account of current-day international observers working in the Balkans. One striking difference, though, is that this report did not receive international exposure until the killings stopped in 1914. The Carnegie panel — the first group of international observers ever on the Balkans — was appointed by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in the fall of 1913, an organization just three years old at the time, to investigate reports of widespread atrocities. However, by the time the panel reached the area, the war was drawing to a close. The report, which was reissued in 1995, makes for depressing reading about the killings, tortures, and rapes that characterized the war among Albanian, Greek, Turkish, Serb, Bulgarian, and local civilians on Macedonian soil.

"The situation is still very bad. We cannot find a model for Muslims and Orthodox Christians to live together," laments local actor Vladimir Endrovski of the Macedonian National Theater in Skopje, who received a small part in both Before the Rain and Dust. For the Macedonian shoot Manchevski has cast 15 Macedonian actors, many of them from the National Theater, and has employed over 1,000 extras as fighters, shepherds, and village members.

Joseph Fiennes of Shakespeare in Love and the Australian actor David Wenham play two mercenary cowboy brothers on opposite sides of the law in turn-of-the-century Macedonia. Their story unfolds through an odd interaction between a 90-year-old woman and a thief in modern-day New York, starring Rosemary Murphy and Adrian Lester.

The film promises to provide a unique insight on the Balkan realities that gave birth to a full-scale war in 1912, when members of the Balkan League — Serbia, Bulgaria, Greece, and Montenegro — fought against the Ottoman Empire. The Balkan League was formed under Russian auspices in the spring of 1912 to liberate Macedonia from Turkish rule. The war led to the pushing out of Turkey from the European continent and to the eventual carving up, in 1913, of historical Macedonia among Bulgaria, Serbia, and Greece.

Manchevski has been waiting to shoot his new masterpiece since 1995, but filming had to be postponed—first due to financial difficulties, then because of the Kosovo crisis. Scheduled for release next spring, the nearly $10 million production is financed by British, Italian, and German companies, with the Macedonian government contributing 5 percent of the costs.

Where past meets future

According to Suzana Milevska, a prominent art curator in Skopje, elsewhere in Europe, modernism was initiated by cubism, but in Macedonia film played the key role. In its symbolism, Macedonian film can be compared to the structure of a "palindrome," she says, as it documents cultural development and the unique circular, or one-way interaction between past and present. This particular circularity of film structure symbolizes the paradoxical nature of time in the Balkans where the "effects have not always linearly succeeded the causes," Milevska wrote in a 1995 essay. Manchevski is also representing that line. Just as Before the Rain, Dust will also serve as a point of contact between past, present, and future.

It does not directly address the last 10 years of drama in the former Yugoslavia. Instead, it tries to reveal some of the distant roots of the conflict and offers up its commentary only "metaphorically," says Auty. The film offers a bitter reminder of the deep-rooted historical causes that make multiethnic coexistence difficult today. It also adeptly shows how reason is pushed into the background by an almost fatalistic vision of the future, guided by the rule of guns and territory. The film's primary aim is not to document history, nor is it to answer questions about the atrocities outlined in the Carnegie report. Yet, it will offer Macedonians some insight into what their soil has witnessed.

Zsofia Szilagyi is a freelance journalist and a Ph.D. candidate in political science at the European University Institute in Florence.