“Before the Rain,” released in 1994 (also known as “Pred Doždot” in Macedonian), directed by Milcho Manchevski, is the first movie he wrote and directed. A co-production between Macedonia, the United Kingdom, and France, the movie can be described as a dramatic war movie. It was nominated for the Best Foreign Language Film category at the 1995 Academy Awards, and it also received five awards from the Venice Film Festival, including the Golden Lion and the FIPRESCI Prize.

“Before the Rain” focuses on Macedonia and provides a socio-political observation of a period marked by internal conflicts and ethnic tensions in the Balkans. The movie adopts an innovative narrative structure that goes beyond its time, centered around ethnic clashes between Orthodox Macedonians and the Albanian Muslim minority.

The director has divided the movie into three separate parts: “Words,” “Faces,” and “Pictures.” The first of the three parts, set in an Orthodox monastery in Macedonia, tells tragic love stories. The second part takes place in London, and the third part returns to Macedonia. The final part ties together the first two parts.

The first part of the movie, titled “Words,” opens with the story of young Orthodox monk Kiril (Grégoire Colin), who resides in a mountain monastery in Macedonia. Committed to his religious beliefs, he has taken a vow of silence and spends his days without speaking. He possesses a melancholic and introverted nature, and all the other clergy members around him are elderly. One night, Kiril returns to his room to find Zamira (Labina Mitevska), a young Muslim Albanian girl, with her hair cut short like a boy. She is terrified and panicked because she is accused of killing a Christian shepherd, and the shepherd’s armed relatives are after her. The young monk takes the girl under his protection. While the war in Bosnia hasn’t reached Macedonia, there is a constant tension between ethnic and religious groups.

The next day, armed Christian militia members arrive in an attempt to capture the girl. They thoroughly search the area but fail to find her. They show no respect even for their own churches, and they besiege the monastery. The head priest, who catches Zamira in Kiril’s room, expels both of them from the monastery. As he leaves, the head priest delivers a hard slap to Kiril and then embraces him. The slap is a consequence of breaking the rules, but the embrace reflects his humane act of protecting an innocent person. The couple, who have managed to escape the siege secretly, plan to go to Skopje. Kiril has started speaking now, but they still can’t understand each other’s languages. After a while, in the mountains, they are captured by the girl’s grandfather and his armed men. The Albanian grandfather brutally beats Zamira first, fearing that her actions might lead to a new conflict. Later, one of his men shoots Zamira in the back with a machine gun, killing her.

The second part, “Faces,” begins with the story of Anne (Katrin Cartlidge), who lives in London and works as a photo editor at a press agency. She is romantically involved with Aleksander (Rade Serbedzija), a successful Macedonian photographer who has won the Pulitzer Prize. While having an affair with Aleksander, she is also contemplating divorcing her estranged husband, Nick (Jay Villiers). Her lover urges her to move to Macedonia with him and start a life there, but Anne is uncertain, especially since she is pregnant with her husband’s child. One day, while having a meeting with her husband at a restaurant, a shooting incident occurs, and one of the bullets fired by a psychopath hits her husband along with several other people in the restaurant. Her husband’s death resulting from this unexpected event makes Anne’s decision-making process easier.

The third and final part of the movie, “Pictures,” opens with the scene of photographer Aleksander returning to his village in Macedonia, which he hasn’t seen in 16 years. Having grown tired of capturing constant war photographs, he comes back to his homeland. Over the years, much has changed in the place where he was born – the village has been divided into Muslim and Christian sections. He spends the night in his old, dilapidated, and abandoned house. The next morning, he reunites with relatives and old friends. One of them is Mitre (Ljupco Bresliski), who was among the militants that stormed the church in the first part. Alex learns that his childhood friends have become enemies. He discovers that his former lover Hana (Silvija Stojanovska) has been ostracized because she is Albanian and Muslim. She has married and divorced, and she also has a daughter – the same daughter who was killed in the first part. Moving to the Muslim section of the village to visit Hana, the woman he loves, Aleksander is welcomed by Hana’s father, the same man who had beaten and killed his granddaughter Zamira in the first part. However, the others in the village treat him coldly and even antagonistically.

The conflict between the groups officially escalates with the killing of Alex’s cousin Bojan (Ilko Stefanovski) by an Albanian girl (who is the same Zamira from the first part). The Christian militants blame Zamira for the murder, and they capture her. Upon Hana’s request, Alex goes to the barn where Zamira is held captive and rescues her. As they flee, they are pursued by gunfire from their cousin Zdrave, and Alex is shot and killed. Zamira manages to escape. At the cost of his own life, Alex manages to save Hana’s daughter from his own relatives. The cycle is complete, and the movie returns to the beginning of the first part. Zamira seeks refuge in a nearby monastery, just as she had done at the start of the story. As Alex had expressed multiple times before his death, it begins to rain – completing the circle.

The movie portrays how conflict is persistent, transcending both time and space, and highlights the suffering that people endure due to it. Although it suggests, as mentioned in its narrative, that “time never dies and is not a simple circle,” the director occasionally subverts this proposition as the plot unfolds.

“Before the Rain” is a movie that exposes naked truths during a period of war and turmoil, without taking sides, and stands out with its powerful narrative and visuals.