Before the Rain

Milcho Manchevski's Before the Rain (1994), his first feature, shared the Golden Lion at Venice and earned an Academy Award nomination: an extraordinary international debut, and the first major film to come out of newly independent Macedonia. It was made as war engulfed the former Yugoslavia, and it spoke with prophetic urgency about the spread of ethnic violence.

The film unfolds in three chapters ('Words', 'Faces', 'Pictures') whose circular, non-linear structure means the stories cannot be reconciled into a simple timeline. The form carries the film's idea of violence as a cycle that feeds on itself. Rade Šerbedžija anchors the central thread as a world-weary war photographer drawn back home, and the Macedonian landscapes give the parable a timeless, almost biblical weight. The recurring line, 'Time never dies, the circle is not round', became the film's signature.

Critics praised its formal daring, its visual beauty and its humane horror at sectarian hatred, and to our eyes it has lost none of its force since. Ambitious, mournful and structurally inventive, Before the Rain takes the specific tragedy of the Balkans and makes of it a parable about how violence perpetuates itself. It remains the defining film of Macedonian cinema and one of the most formally striking debut features of the 1990s. Of all the European films of the 1990s that dealt with the Yugoslav wars, few have aged as well.