Tribune Excerpts

The following article appeared in the April 2008 Edition of the Macedonian Tribune

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Manchevski’s Shadows at the Santa Barbara International Film Festival

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To live through these moments in this setting allows for an uncanny intimacy – a face-off with personal fear that leads, strangely enough, to a celebration of life. But, Lazar has yet to make that journey, for his “shadows” are walking among the living, indeed, through every step of life.

Cinematographer Fabio Cianchetti generates his foreboding trajectory visually through the use of double images, often refl ections, broken spaces, the mirroring of each persona in another, and characters who either drop out of the frame mysteriously and just as suddenly reappear or, surprisingly, vanish before our very eyes. The rope marks on Menka’s neck appear, disappear, and re-appear; just as “superstitions” are visualized (a woman explains a birthmark on her arm as the consequence of her mother eating stolen grapes while she was pregnant). Much as Lazar resists the matriarch rope of his own mother, his curiosity and conscience allow him to fathom the waves of intruders in Macedonia over centuries, their theft of the land and its people, and the unpaid debt at stake for Lazar regardless of the degree of his personal complicity.

Audiences familiar with the history of the region recall that Greece together with Serbia, Bulgaria and Montenegro declared war on Turkey in 1912. No sooner did this act liberate Macedonia from occupation under the Ottoman Empire than it precipitated Macedonia’s being parceled out to its neighbors. Greece seized upon Aegean Macedonia for ethnic cleansing, sending hundreds of thousands into exodus, appropriating their land, banning use of their languages and renaming places, plundering villages and destroying homes. Ethnic Greeks from countries further east were brought in to re-populate the region. The Greek Civil War of the 1940s only exacerbated the problem, allowing internments to continue as late as 1974 (the year Lazar’s mother excavated the bones for her anatomy class in the film).

“Covering up past genocide is only expanding it,” Manchevski has commented, “and I felt that this story should find a place in Shadows, which talks about the responsibility of the individual in the face of family and history.”

In 1991, Macedonia emerged from the “ashes” of the former Yugoslavia. Manchevski then began to approach filmmaking through fractured, overlapping and circular narratives, interspersed with historical passages and ellipses, to tell the tales of his homelands Shadows departs from this approach, opting for a more straightforward development of the story, but adds to it a dreamscape of personal torment. Call it a “ghost story” but know that it feels more like Bergman or Polanski, or even Shakespeare – Macbeth and Hamlet come to mind.

Retaining an ensemble of actors from one film to the next, Manchevski used two first-time film actors in Shadows for the lead roles. Borce Nacev as Lazar and Vesna Stanojevska as Menka both deliver remarkable performances. As for the director, if you view Lazar as a visionary not unlike the filmmaker, himself, pursing the artist’s journey, that journey is also an allegory of cinema when its task is to lead us to see – at whatever price – and to dream.