Before the Rain

Before the Rain (Macedonian: Pred doždot, Пред дождот) is a 1994 war drama written and directed by Milcho Manchevski, the first feature film produced in the newly independent Republic of Macedonia.¹ Told in three interconnected parts titled "Words," "Faces," and "Pictures," it follows a silent Orthodox monk, a London photographic editor, and a Macedonian war photographer whose stories circle around ethnic violence in Macedonia and the war then consuming neighboring Bosnia.^{2 • 3} The film shared the Golden Lion at the 1994 Venice Film Festival and was nominated for the 1995 Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film.⁴

Origins and production

To shoot the film, Manchevski went back to Macedonia; although born Macedonian, the director had lived in the US for years, working on documentaries and music videos, the best known being "Tennessee" for Arrested Development.¹ In the foreword to the published screenplay he dates the project's birth to the second half of 1991, when he wrote the first five pages; the script grew from five pages to more than a hundred in two weeks in 1993, the film was shot the same year, and it was finished in 1994.⁷

An international co-production. The film was financed from Macedonia, England, and France, with production companies including Polygram, Aim Production, Noah Production, and Vardar Film of Skopje.² The UK component was anchored by Aim Productions, British Screen, and Channel Four, a funding pattern typical of mid-1990s European art cinema.¹ The score was written by the Macedonian group Anastasia.⁵ The film was shot and finished on 35 mm film stock in the traditional way, as Manchevski later recalled.⁸

The premiere carried symbolic weight for the young state: the world premiere took place in the Sala Grande at Venice on 4 September 1994, followed by the first commercial screening in Macedonia on 5 October 1994 at the Brothers Manaki festival in Bitola and in Skopje the next day.⁶ A commemorative account published for the film's 25th anniversary gives the Venice premiere date as 6 September 1994.⁹

Reception and awards

The film arrived as a festival sensation. At Venice 1994 it won the Golden Lion for Best Film, shared with Tsai Ming-liang's Vive L'Amour, along with the FIPRESCI Prize, the Pasinetti Award for Best Actor for Rade Šerbedžija, the OCIC Award Honorable Mention, the Kodak Award for Best First Feature, and several audience and critics' prizes.^{4 • 10} It went on to win the Independent Spirit Award for Best Foreign Film in 1996, the Silver Condor from the Argentinean Film Critics Association in 1997, a Special David at the David di Donatello Awards in 1995, and prizes at Stockholm, São Paulo, Puerto Rico, Warsaw, and Saint Petersburg, among other festivals.^{4 • 10} In 1995 it was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film, Macedonia's entry.⁴ It was the country's first-ever Oscar submission as an independent state, and it was nominated on that first try.¹¹ IMDb records 29 wins and 4 nominations in total.⁴

Commercially, the film earned $763,847.¹² Critics praised the ambition of its structure, the score, and Šerbedžija's performance; dissent focused on the explicitness of its aphorisms and on whether the symmetrical distribution of blame amounted to political evasion.¹ Reviewers including Roger Ebert and Janet Maslin noted structural parallels with Pulp Fiction, released the same year, though Manchevski has insisted the two were conceived independently.^{13 • 11}

Legacy

The film is regarded as the cornerstone of Macedonian cinema and remains, by one account, the most famous Macedonian film.^{11 • 14} Dina Iordanova, a scholar of Balkan cinema, wrote that Macedonia, whose entire production consisted of about 50 feature titles, came into the spotlight with the celebrated film.¹⁵ The Criterion Collection released the film in 2008, and it appears on the Criterion list at number 1146.^{11 • 12}

When fighting broke out in Macedonia in 2001, the movie was seen anew as having predicted the violence, an interpretation Manchevski has hesitated to accept; what endures more is its form, since it stands among the clearest examples of a film in which the circular structure itself makes the argument about violence.¹ The Macedonian Cinematheque digitized the film in 2014 as part of a program of digitizing Manchevski's works.⁸ In 2019 the film was screened in Suzhou, China, for the 25th anniversary of its premiere year, where Manchevski revealed how close the project had come to not happening.⁸

References

1. Before the Rain (1994) — analysis, Sightlines
2. Before the Rain — Vardar Film, Skopje
3. Before the rain = Pred dozhdot — ACMI collection
4. Before the Rain (1994) — Awards, IMDb
5. Pre kiše | 1994 — Cinema City
6. „Пред дождот" е ремек-дело — Нова Македонија
7. Before the Rain screenplay foreword — Milcho Manchevski
8. „Пред дождот" за малку немаше да се случи — Reporter.mk
9. Во МАНУ одбележани 25 години од „Пред дождот" — Нова Македонија
10. Awards for Feature Films — manchevski.com
11. How Before the Rain was received — Sightlines
12. Before the Rain — Cinegraph
13. Milcho Manchevski's Before the Rain (1994) — East European Film Bulletin
14. Перед дождем (Before the Rain) — Cineticle
15. Gordana P. Crnković, "Milcho Manchevski's Before the Rain and the Ethics of Listening," Slavic Review

Topic: Encyclopedia › Arts and culture › Screen and stage › Film and television › Films and standalone screen works › Individual films by title and year › Drama and biographical films (individual works) › Drama films 1990s › Drama films early 1990s

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 15, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026 · Last review: Oct 25, 2026

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