The filmmaker.

Dust (2001), Macedonian filmmaker Milcho Manchevski's second feature, is an anachronistic and iconoclastic crosscultural "baklava Western" that explores what happens when West meets East in the violent history of the Balkans. The film takes viewers on a wild ride across time and space that begins in contemporary New York City, goes back to the American Wild West, and then to the Macedonian revolution of 1903, where two American cowboys find themselves caught up in a battle between Macedonian revolutionaries, Greek and Albanian bandits, and the ruling Turkish military. Dust opened at the Venice Film Festival in 2001 and has since spurred essays, articles, and even a major conference. The film offers one of the first cinematic presentations of regional history from a Macedonian perspective. Incorporating the filmmaker's historical research, it paints a visceral and violent picture of how alliances between the Turkish oppressors and Greek clergy, and terrible acts committed by Albanian and Greek bandits, shaped Macedonia's history and sense of identity. The film was made independently with European funds following Manchevski's falling out with Miramax over control of the picture and, despite its Western themes and international recognition, it had difficulty finding American distribution. It was only introduced to a few American markets in 2003, when Lion's Gate purchased the U.S. distribution rights.

Dust is a long-awaited successor to Manchevski's Oscar-nominated debut feature, Before the Rain (1994), which presented a tragic set of stories about love and violence in modern Europe. In the wake of an infamous outburst of violence in Macedonia, the segmented narrative of Before the Rain follows three love stories that take place in war-torn Macedonia and far away in London. In both features, Manchevski uses diverse characters and a fragmented narrative structure to create a mosaic in which the details of history are subjective, contradictory, and illusory, and recollections are repeatedly altered to suit the desires of the storytellers or the narrative structures of the stories that they want to tell. In Dust, Manchevski carries this approach to abstract and surreal dimensions. The histories that the characters present seem to change at whim, and the characters even insert themselves into events that would have occurred long before they were born. The surreal qualities of their stories are enhanced by dream sequences, bizarre anachronisms, faux archival recordings, and strange settings. Manchevski also combines black-and-white and color film to play with audience expectations about what is past and present. In these ways, the filmmaker intentionally undermines "a basic author-viewer contract," as Manchevski describes it, "that the film will maintain a unified tone and surface like an old-fashioned painting."

Nikolina Kujaca and Davis Wenham in Dust.

RODERICK COOVER: Dust is a film about storytelling and history that takes place in worlds not usually thought of together-contemporary New York City, the American Wild West, and the Macedonian revolution. What did you learn from the contrasts between those different worlds?

MILCHO MANCHEVSKI: Contrast is good. It's good for drama, and good for art. I learned that there is more in common than you would think, and this is probably the result of our need to create little or big clichés, since life seems to be easier to explain away that way. In addition, in Dust I was aiming for a story which incorporates the structure of the story itself as a crucial element of the story.

On paper, Macedonia under Ottoman rule and the Wild West sounded like an outrageous combination, but when I started doing the research and then filming, the two places felt like they could go together. The original inspiration came when I saw there were common elements in the iconography of the Macedonian revolution at the turn of the century that are visually similar to that of the Wild West and of the Mexican revolutionaries and bandits, with their long beards, bandoliers, and white horses. It is as if they all shopped in the same boutique. The warriors seemed to draw on many of the same ideals of a warrior code, at least visually.

I discovered things that seemed surreal when seen through the eyes of somebody who frequently watches Western movies, things like the fact that Billy the Kid was from Brooklyn, the fact that cowboys and Indians rarely fought because by the time the cowboys came into being there weren't many Indians left in the area-Texas and Oklahoma-or the fact that General Custer was one of the worst students ever to attend West Point.

In doing research, I also discovered that there were actually Americans coming to Macedonia. The American writer Albert Sonnichsen, who had previously been in the war in the Philippines (like an earlier and lesser-known John Reed), fought in the Macedonian revolution for a period of six months and returned to San Francisco to write a book about it called Confessions of a Macedonian Bandit. He even carried a camera with him, and traded processing chemicals with the leader of the rebels. Sonnichsen (or a nastier version of him) could be the prototype for Luke, had not Luke been written before I found out about him. Reality did its best to support this piece of fiction. Contemporary New York felt like the right third side of the triangle-it is equally different from each of the two. On a more personal level, all three are integral parts of who I am.

What happens as the story of a battle between brothers in the Wild West is told in the East, in Macedonia?

The only difference is the fact that both brothers are away from home. When you are in a familiar environment it is softer. There in Macedonia, the brothers' conflict became harsher. Placing the archetypes in new contexts means questioning them as elements in how you tell a story. They can become richer, or they can deflate. It is sort of like a Robert Rauschenberg print: a piece of it could be found-art and another piece made from a photograph, some of it is an actual brushstroke, but what really matters is what these pieces tell you as a whole-when you step back-rather than what they tell you on their own.

However, I think all films are about people and not about the grand ideas underpinning the films. This became a film about a very old woman, almost 100 years old, telling a story-and we don't know how much of it she is making up-about a thief who is, in a way, us (the listener), about two brothers in the Wild West who travel to Macedonia, about an immigrant prostitute, about a revolutionary, and about his pregnant wife. Dust is about the thirst to hear stories and, more importantly, to tell stories. We seem to learn a great deal about how to behave from the stories we hear in life.

Edge is us, the viewer. He is also the character who changes the most. In the process of storytelling, Angela becomes the mother to Edge and to the narrative. She doesn't have any children, but the story is hers. She adopts the thief as if to pass her story on in the few days she has left. In both Dust and Before The Rain, the women are the strong characters despite the male posturing and guns. The women support the infrastructure of what is going on. Just as in life. Edge is the listener of the story who then takes it on as his own. The story is a virus, I guess. You give it to someone else and change it in the process. Edge is us.

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