Before the Rain

If you only have time for one tonight, start with Amour. But if you have a second hour, spend it here — the two are two faces of the same coin.

Amour is a private circle: how a life finishes its last passage inside one apartment. Before the Rain is a public one: how hatred circulates between a village and a city, beginning and ending at the same point.

Three chapters — 'Words', 'Faces', 'Pictures' — run end to end, and the rain of the title never quite falls. The first film made in an independent North Macedonia, and it won the Golden Lion on arrival.

马其顿的一座东正教修道院里，年轻修士 Kiril 发下了沉默誓言。某天清晨，他发现房间里藏着一个阿尔巴尼亚族女孩 Zamira——村里正到处找她，说她是杀人凶手。

伦敦，图片编辑 Anne 正经历着婚姻的疲倦；她的爱人、普利策奖摄影记者 Aleksandr 刚从马其顿回来，正准备回到他离开 16 年的故乡。

三个故事，三种语言——马其顿语、阿尔巴尼亚语、英语——最后汇聚成同一个循环。

Golden Lion at the 51st Venice Film Festival, 1994 (shared with Tsai Ming-liang's Vive L'Amour); the first film made in North Macedonia after independence, and the country's first-ever Academy Award nomination for Best Foreign Language Film — it ultimately lost to Nikita Mikhalkov's Burnt by the Sun.

Milcho Manchevski's feature debut: until then a New York-based director of shorts and music videos. The line that recurs throughout — time never dies, the circle is not round — is the film's structural manifesto: its three chapters, 'Words', 'Faces' and 'Pictures', run out of chronological order, and the third chapter's ending loops back to the first chapter's beginning.

Score by the Macedonian band Anastasia, photographed by Manuel Teran. 92% on Rotten Tomatoes. Included in The New York Times Guide to the Best 1000 Movies Ever Made; the international breakthrough for Rade Šerbedžija.