The (New) New Wave | МУЗЕЈ

Film still from contemporary Macedonian cinema

There is a mildly embarrassing thing that happens when the West “discovers” a small cinema, which is that the cinema in question is treated as if it had been waiting, patiently and perhaps a little quaintly, for someone in Berlin or Park City or Los Angeles to certify its existence. Macedonian cinema, of course, did not begin when Honeyland reached the Oscars, any more than a mountain begins when someone photographs it from the road. But Honeyland did perform the particular magic that awards seasons are still, sometimes, capable of performing: it made a local story legible without making it smaller, flatter, easier, or less strange. In 2020, it was nominated for both Documentary Feature and International Feature Film—an almost absurdly neat summary of its dual identity as intimate ethnography and global art object.

The film’s lesson was not that Macedonian filmmakers should become more universal. It was that the universal, when it is any good, usually enters through the side door: a beekeeper’s rule, a rural economy, a mother in a dark room, a landscape that looks as if it has survived several versions of history and is not especially impressed by the current one. The next wave of Macedonian filmmakers is not getting seen in the West by trying to look Western. It is getting seen by becoming more exact—more village, more apartment, more ritual, more grief, more girls, more family, more folklore, more untranslatable pressure.

The films are small, but not minor. Small, in this case, means that the unit of drama is not the nation but the room; not History, capital H, but the person trapped inside the institutional machinery that History leaves behind. A police station. A speed-dating event. A school corridor. A queer household in Skopje. A remote Yuruk village where music becomes not merely music but a kind of unauthorized exit. The uploaded research frames this as the defining post-Mančevski shift: away from large historical allegory and toward intimate, character-centered films that move through Berlin, Venice, Sundance, Karlovy Vary, and Tribeca before reaching specialized Western audiences.

This does not mean that the past has disappeared. Macedonian cinema carries a deep institutional memory. The Manaki Brothers festival in Bitola presents itself as the world’s first and oldest festival dedicated to cinematographers and traces its first edition to 1979; the Cinematheque of Macedonia, founded in 1974 and active from 1976, preserves national audiovisual heritage and remains one of the country’s central film institutions. Before the current wave, there was Milčo Mančevski’s Before the Rain, the post-Yugoslav landmark that won the Golden Lion at Venice and received an Oscar nomination for Foreign Language Film.

For a long time, that was the unavoidable comparison: Where is the next Mančevski? But the better question is what happens when a younger cinema stops trying to answer a question it did not ask. The new Macedonian filmmakers have not rejected Mančevski’s seriousness about place, violence, and identity. They have rejected his scale. The symbolic landscape has moved indoors. The national wound has become a family arrangement, a religious ceremony, a text message, a household budget, a girl’s reputation, a body that does not know which form it is permitted to take.

Teona Strugar Mitevska is the bridge figure here, the filmmaker who makes the generational hinge visible. God Exists, Her Name Is Petrunya is built around the kind of premise that sounds almost too clean until one realizes that real social absurdity often has the structure of a parable: a woman catches the Epiphany cross in a ritual reserved for men, and the town’s religious, legal, masculine, and media systems suddenly reveal themselves as one large machine for putting her back where she belongs. The film played in Berlinale competition and won the 2019 LUX Prize.

What makes Mitevska’s best work so sharp is that she understands bureaucracy as drama. Not bureaucracy as paperwork—although there is always paperwork somewhere, waiting to become destiny—but bureaucracy as weather. The woman is not merely opposed by men. She is opposed by the arrangement of the room, by the priest’s certainty, by the policeman’s exhaustion, by the camera crew’s hunger for spectacle, by the community’s terror that if this rule can be broken, then perhaps all rules are only habits wearing ceremonial clothes.

Goran Stolevski, by contrast, enters through metamorphosis. You Won’t Be Alone is set in an isolated mountain village in nineteenth-century Macedonia and follows a girl transformed into a witch, but to call it folk horror is slightly like calling a fever “warm.” Focus Features’ own synopsis gives the skeleton of the story; what matters is the way Stolevski uses folklore not as decorative antiquity but as a grammar of embodiment—how it feels to have a body, to borrow one, to desire through one, to be a self only intermittently.

Then Housekeeping for Beginners brings that same question of belonging into the contemporary city. The film premiered in Venice’s Orizzonti section, won the Queer Lion, became Macedonia’s international Oscar submission, and was released in the U.S. by Focus Features. But its real accomplishment is less résumé than density: a queer, multilingual, Roma-inflected, improvised household in Skopje that has to become a family because the official forms of family are either unavailable, hostile, or too slow to arrive. Stolevski’s great subject may be kinship after structure—the way people keep making families in the ruins or gaps of the sanctioned ones.

Dina Duma’s Sisterhood turns the wave toward adolescence, which is to say toward a social order even more punitive and less honest than adulthood. Karlovy Vary’s program describes the film as a story of two adolescent girls whose friendship is threatened by the repercussions of manipulative behavior, set in a teen community where followers outrank genuine relationships. This is Macedonia not as Balkan allegory but as notification ecology: shame moving at upload speed, cruelty made ambient, girlhood as a closed room with Wi-Fi.

And then comes Georgi M. Unkovski’s DJ Ahmet, the sort of film that makes one suspicious of the phrase “coming-of-age,” because the phrase is too polite for what adolescence actually is, which is often the discovery that the world has already drafted a contract on your behalf. Sundance awarded DJ Ahmet both the World Cinema Dramatic Audience Award and a Special Jury Award for Creative Vision in 2025. Its official description centers a fifteen-year-old boy from a remote Yuruk village who finds refuge in music while navigating his father’s expectations, a conservative community, and first love.

The film’s power, at least as an emblem of the next wave, is that it does not appear to be asking Western audiences to admire hardship from a safe distance. It offers music, humor, tenderness, frustration, and the particular claustrophobia of being young in a place where everyone knows the rules and no one remembers consenting to them. This may be the most exportable form of Macedonian specificity: not misery, not exoticism, but pressure plus rhythm.

There is, underneath all this, an industrial irony so clean it almost seems invented for critics: the more intimate these films become onscreen, the more transnational they become behind the scenes. The North Macedonia Film Agency began operations in 2014 as the successor to the Film Fund and supports national films, co-productions, festivals, and industry development; the country also offers a 20% rebate on qualifying local spend. The domestic market is small—FilmNewEurope reported 262,402 admissions and 26 screens in 2022—so the films that travel are often financed and circulated through co-production networks, sales agents, public funds, and festivals.

This is not a contradiction. It is the condition of the work. A Macedonian film may begin in a village, a Skopje apartment, a religious ritual, or a school corridor, but its path to a Western viewer may run through Belgium, Croatia, Serbia, Poland, Denmark, France, Australia, Venice, Sundance, Focus Features, Films Boutique, Kinology, or New Europe Film Sales. The cinema is local in sensation and international in plumbing.

The mistake would be to call this a breakthrough as if the door had simply opened. Doors do not open for small cinemas; they are usually negotiated, subsidized, co-produced, translated, subtitled, programmed, sold, reviewed, and then—only then—mistaken for destiny. The next Macedonian wave is not a miracle. It is a system learning how to make intimacy travel.

And there we have it: Macedonian cinema’s advantage is not scale. It is closeness. Its new films arrive with small rooms and large consequences, with girls and mothers and witches and beekeepers and boys who want music louder than obedience. They do not ask whether the West is ready for Macedonian stories. They demonstrate, with an almost mischievous calm, that the more specific the story becomes, the farther it can go.

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