The Resilience of Macedonian Cinema and Its Global Stars

By the ULTIMATE Skopje Editorial Team

The birth of Balkan film and the Manaki brothers (1905–1944)

The story of film in the Balkans begins in Bitola. In 1905 Yanaki and Milton Manaki, Aromanian photographers with a studio in the town, brought a Bioscope camera, number 300, back from London, and their first short film shows their grandmother Despina spinning wool: among the very first moving pictures made in the region.

The brothers went on to film royal visits, ceremonies and the life of the southern Balkans, a documentary eye that still runs through the country’s cinema.

The Manaki Brothers Film Festival →   Bitola and Heraclea: the city of consuls and its mosaics →   Bitola: our guide →

The socialist era and Vardar Film (1945–1990)

After the Second World War, film-making was organised within the Yugoslav system, and Vardar Film was founded in Skopje in 1947. Early films kept to socialist realism and the partisan struggle, as in Volca nok (1955).

The studio soon widened its range to psychological drama, period epics such as Macedonian Blood Wedding (1967) and pointed social films like Kiril Cenevski’s Black Seed (Crno seme, 1971), an acclaimed and unsparing portrait of Macedonian soldiers held on a prison island in the late 1940s.

The modern, independent and international era (1990s–present)

Independence, reached peacefully in 1991, opened a new chapter. Free of the old ideological limits, film-makers turned to the tensions and changes of the transition years and to universal human stories.

Supported today by the North Macedonia Film Agency, Macedonian cinema has moved towards visual, universal art-house film, and it has made history at Venice, at Sundance and at the Academy Awards.

Must-watch films: the foundational classics

To grasp the breadth of the country’s cinema, start with the foundational classics, then the films that won the world’s great prizes.

• Frosina (1952): Vojislav Nanović’s moving drama of a mother’s sacrifices was the first Macedonian feature film, and one of Vardar Film’s first productions.
• Miss Stone (1958): Živorad Mitrović’s lavish historical drama, one of the first big popular successes of Macedonian cinema, tells the true story of the 1901 kidnapping of an American missionary.
• Stand Up Straight, Delfina (Ispravi se, Delfina, 1977): Aleksandar Đurčinov’s gripping psychological drama follows a young woman swimming the English Channel as she relives her troubled past.

Must-watch films: global masterpieces and contemporary triumphs

• Before the Rain (Pred doždot, 1994): Milcho Manchevski’s masterful three-part tragedy on the cycle of violence won the Golden Lion in Venice and an Oscar nomination for best foreign language film.
• Honeyland (Medena zemja, 2019): Tamara Kotevska and Ljubomir Stefanov’s intimate, poetic documentary about a wild-bee keeper became the first film ever nominated for the Oscars for both best international feature and best documentary.
• You Won’t Be Alone (2022): Goran Stolevski’s haunting, atmospheric first feature, starring Noomi Rapace and filmed in a remote North Macedonian village, was Australia’s official Oscar submission.
• DJ Ahmet (2025): Georgi M. Unkovski’s first feature mixes village tradition and electronic dance music, and won both the Audience Award and a Special Jury Award for Creative Vision in the World Cinema Dramatic competition at Sundance.

The iconic domestic film stars

The golden age of Vardar Film and the Skopje stage created screen icons of great dramatic weight and range.

• Darko Damevski: a commanding, intense presence of early Macedonian cinema, remembered for Stand Up Straight, Delfina.
• Risto Šiškov: a brilliant, tragic figure of the screen, whose emotional vulnerability and psychological depth made him a defining face of 1970s drama.
• Petre Prličko: for many the grandmaster of character acting and comic timing in the region, warm and deeply human across dozens of films.
• Ilija Džuvalekovski: a versatile star of stage and screen whose reputation reached far beyond North Macedonia, from early dramas such as Volca nok to the great Yugoslav co-productions.
• Labina Mitevska: after her international debut in Before the Rain, an influential actress and producer of festival favourites across Europe.
• Blagoj Veselinov: one of the most acclaimed actors of the new generation, a European Shooting Star of 2019, best known for his lead in the award-winning Secret Ingredient (2017).

The Manaki Brothers Film Festival

North Macedonia’s great gift to world film culture is the International Cinematographers’ Film Festival “Manaki Brothers”, held each autumn in Bitola since 1979. It was one of the first festivals anywhere devoted to the art of the cinematographer, putting the people behind the camera, not just directors and actors, in the spotlight.

Its top prize, the Golden Camera 300, is named after the brothers’ camera and awarded by an international jury, and its lifetime honours have gone to some of the greatest cinematographers of all, among them Sven Nykvist, Roger Deakins, John Seale, Edward Lachman and Darius Khondji.

Our advice: combine the festival with a few days in Bitola and Ohrid, and check the programme on the festival’s own website, manaki.com.mk, before you book.

Manaki Brothers festival: official website →   The festival on our guide →   Lake Ohrid: one of the oldest lakes in the world →   Cinematheque of North Macedonia →

The film-makers abroad

Film-makers of Macedonian birth and heritage have left a lasting mark on international and American cinema.

• Milcho Manchevski: the director who put modern Macedonian cinema on the world map. Based for many years in New York, he directed an episode of HBO’s The Wire and the American independent film Bikini Moon, and is an influential voice in art-house cinema.
• Goran Stolevski: the writer-director of Macedonian heritage who works between Melbourne and Europe, whose films have premiered to acclaim at Sundance, Berlin and Venice.
• Mitko Panov: the director and teacher who trained in Poland and works in the West; his short With Raised Hands won the Palme d’Or for short film at Cannes in 1991.

Skopje on film →   From the Cinematheque to the multiplex: how Skopje goes to the movies →   Balkan Cinema: our long read on the whole region →

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