May 5, 1999 |
SKOPJE,
Macedonia -- Last spring, Benny Castrati used to sit late at
night at Pristina restaurants and at his family's large white stucco home
with wood trim, entertaining guests over glasses of wine and too many
cigarettes with tall tales about his encounters with the glamorous and the
celebrated. He would, for instance, frequently remind dinner guests of his
friendship with actress Vanessa Redgrave, and their plans for a major film
festival in Kosovo's modest provincial capital. Castrati, a 30-year-old
Kosovar Albanian actor with a thick head of dark hair, a goatee and a
mischievous, cocky charm, had a minor role in the award-winning film
"Before the Rain." The film is an achingly beautiful story about a
photojournalist covering the Bosnian war who comes home to his native
Macedonia only to witness its dissolution into civil war.
One month ago, Benny Castrati, his wife and five-month-old baby
daughter crossed the frontier between Kosovo and Macedonia as refugees.
They are now living in a borrowed house in the southwestern Macedonian
city of Struga, on the northern shore of Lake Ohrid, not far from the
Orthodox monastery -- Sveti Jovan Kaneo -- that serves as the backdrop to
the film that made Castrati a local celebrity.
Five years after it was released, "Before the Rain," directed by the
Macedonian-born Milcho Manchevski, has never seemed closer to reality. In
the past six weeks, hundreds of thousands of Kosovar Albanians have fled
Serbian forces for safety. More than 160,000 have ended up in Macedonia,
causing ethnic tensions between Macedonia's own Slavic and ethnic Albanian
population to flicker. It's not hard to imagine those tensions igniting
into civil war. The fact that one of the film's own actors has become a
refugee of the latest Balkan ethnic conflict is only one of many ironies
that surround the film. Its star, actor Rade Serbedzija, who played the
photojournalist, is also a refugee -- from the Serbian capital Belgrade,
which he fled for London during the war between Croatia and Serbia
(1991-1995). Serbedzija, a Serb born in Croatia, has two children with his
Croatian first wife. He told me in an interview in 1997 that, given the
fact his own children were half-Croat, he couldn't generate enough
nationalist zeal to please the Serbian authorities. Having received death
threats, he felt he had no future in Serbia, so he left.
"Before the Rain" is moving because it transcends the "war is hell"
genre by decoding the real tragedy of civil war: the interconnectedness of
the people who find themselves killing each other. The film opens on the
lush vineyard steppes of the Saint Jovan Kaneo monastery, when a young,
dark-eyed Orthodox monk (played by Gregoire Colin) finds himself
unexpectedly sheltering a Macedonian Albanian teenage girl (played by
Labina Matevska) in his Spartan monk's cell. She is fleeing some sort of
trouble -- it's not clear initially what. A roving band of drunk
paramilitary soldiers armed with Uzis comes to the monastery looking for
her. As they tear the place up in an orgy of violence, the Slav monk and
the Albanian girl flee for the hills. (It turns out the paramilitaries
think the girl is responsible for killing a young shepherd, although it
never becomes clear who really did it.) Meanwhile, a celebrated
Macedonian-born war photographer, Aleksandar (played by Serbedzija), has
just returned from the war in Bosnia to his base in London. He tries to
convince his married British lover, a beautiful photo editor played by
Katrin Cartlidge, to go back to Macedonia with him. We see her flipping
through photographs he's taken -- including some of the young monk. She
can't make up her mind if she should go, and he returns to Macedonia
without her. Shortly after, we discover she's pregnant with the
photographer's child. (In one scene, we see how the war in the faraway
Balkans somehow stretches to claim lives in a London restaurant.) Back in
Macedonia, Aleksandar returns to his small village, where his childhood
love, Hana, an ethnic Albanian, asks him to help protect her daughter --
the same girl we saw hiding in the beginning of the film. Each
individual's story comes together in the devastating final scenes, shot on
a hillside not far from where the Kosovars are now sheltering in refugee
camps.
"I feel that any civil war is killing your own," Milcho Manchevski, the
film's 40-year-old director, said by telephone recently from a hotel room
in Florence, Italy. "It's the evil from within. You don't realize at first
that you are killing your own kin. It's how the war started in what used
to be Yugoslavia."
Manchevski grew up in Macedonia when it was
part of Yugoslavia, studied architecture, and then went to film school
at Southern Illinois University. He made music videos in New York for MTV,
and then began writing "Before the Rain" in 1991, the year war broke out
between Croatia and Serbia. His first and only feature to date, "Before
the Rain" won the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival in 1994, was
nominated for an Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film in 1995 and won the
Independent Spirit Award in Los Angeles in 1996. Manchevski now divides
his time between New York and his house in Skopje, where he says the war
in Kosovo and the NATO air strikes have come within earshot.
"I heard planes and explosions every night," Manchevski says of his
recent visit to Skopje, where he is organizing an exhibit of his photos at
its Museum of Contemporary Art, on a grassy hill near the ruins of an old
fortress. "My house is 15 miles from where there is a war. Of course
everyone is scared."
While the film deals with tensions and friendships between Macedonia's
Slavic Orthodox population and its Albanian Muslims, Manchevski says
"Before the Rain" is not really about the Balkans at all.
"It's not a documentary," he insists. "It's not even about Yugoslavia
or Macedonia. It's about the feeling of waiting for something to explode.
Waiting for something terrible to happen. Someone came up to me at a
showing in Seattle once and said this very same story could have happened
in India. I think that's right -- it's universal, the human
condition."
Manchevski says he left some things in the film ambiguous on
purpose.
"I left the first killing off-screen, because it really doesn't matter
who started it. Whoever did it, it is not a reason to start a war."
Despite the ever-increasing proximity of the war to Macedonia,
Manchevski says he does not think the war will come here.
"The people I know would prefer a civil society where it doesn't matter
what your nationality is. But it goes both ways."
Upon reflection, the meaning of the Macedonian photographer's British
girlfriend flipping through his photographs in the film becomes clear. She
represents those of us in the West reading the newspapers and looking at
photographs of the faraway Balkan war, surprised to find that it affects
us more directly than we thought.
From salon.com
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