Proiezione speciale – Omaggio Milcho Manchevski
DUST (Inghilterra, Germania, Italia, Macedonia del Nord, 2001,127’) di Milcho Manchevski
With the presence of the director
In present-day New York, a young thief named Edge breaks into the apartment of Angela, a dying centenarian who turns the tables on him at gunpoint. Holding him captive, she spins a tale that becomes his only way out. The story leaps back a century to the American West and Ottoman-controlled Macedonia, where two outlaw brothers — Luke and Elijah — are torn apart by their love for the same woman, Lilith. Estranged, they end up on opposite sides of a Macedonian uprising. Manchevski refuses to keep the two worlds neatly apart — Angela's gold coins and her words bleed across the century divide, her storytelling actively reshaping the past, and the past giving birth to the present, until the two timelines mirror and contaminate each other. The result is a fractured, fearless narrative structure that makes Dust one of world cinema's most original and undervalued films. When it premiered as the Opening Night film in Venice in 2001, it was swept into a controversy born of a misreading of its themes. Twenty-five years later, the anniversary reminds us that political storms pass, while art continues to speak.
Milcho Manchevski (Skopje, 1959) rose to international prominence with Before the Rain, regarded as one of the greatest debut films in cinema history. The film won the Golden Lion in Venice in 1994 and numerous international awards, and was nominated for an Academy Award. His work as a director continued with acclaimed films such as Dust, Shadows, Mothers, Bikini Moon, Willow, Kaymak, and numerous short films. After a conflict with the Macedonian Film Agency that sparked international solidarity and was ultimately resolved in his favour, his new feature Sister Brother Manhole Cover and the documentary Good People are expected in 2026.
One of the finest exponents of cinema as the art of sculpting time, understood in the Tarkovskyan sense, Milcho Manchevski has forged a visual grammar throughout his body of work in which the history and culture of his homeland, North Macedonia, are blended with a cosmopolitan sensibility born of the recurring, though never definitive, experience of expatriation: to the United States, his second home, Italy, and many other latitudes. His films are permeated by a refined humanist impulse in which empathy and a sense of the grotesque go hand in hand. “I make films about people, not about places” is a mantra that recurs in his interviews, and the two works to be screened in Pesaro – Dust and, for the first time in Italy, Bikini Moon – reflect precisely this conception of cinema.
The two films are situated at opposite ends of the budget spectrum. The former is a grand meditation on time and history, while the latter reflects on the non-teleological nature of cinema itself — each one inventing a genre in its own way. Dust is an “Eastern”, reworking the quintessentially American genre in order to tell two intertwined stories set a century apart, taking place between the New York of 2000 (profoundly different from the post-9/11 city that would emerge a year later) and Ottoman-controlled Macedonia in 1905. Bikin Moon is a meta-mockumentary that radically questions the truth claim inherent in every documentary, ultimately resolving into a modernist portrait of one of the most authentic characters in American indie cinema of the past decade.
Suspended between two continents and multiple eras, the cinema of Milcho Manchevski is immersed in history and stories, unfailingly conjuring an imago mundi held in the unresolved tension of waiting – before the rain, before love, and before cinema itself. With its conventions and powers, cinema stands poised to transfigure all things.
Ludovico Cantisani
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