This was Manchevski's first film, which won an award at the Venice Film Festival in 1994; his second is due to appear soon. (That is, assuming that he finds a distributor -- which was a problem with Before the Rain.) Manchevski's training is American, and he lives mainly in New York, but he has kept a foothold in Macedonia where he was born (in 1950, in Skopje) and raised. His themes and settings span East and West, but his sensibility comes from his homeland, and his driving impulse seems to be to explore the meanings of the Balkans' beauty and cruelty.

This film is presented in three episodes, the first and last of them set in the remote hill country of Macedonia, the other in London. The story-telling within each episode is immediately understandable (though not necessarily the implications of what has occurred). However, the ordering of the episodes has something "elegantly circular" about it, as one critic said; that is, the viewer cannot be entirely sure what happened before what. The purpose, surely achieved with most viewers, is to make us think. As Manchevski says, "I want the viewer to feel as people felt when they first saw a Cubist painting. I want them to put the puzzle together."

Whether or not you enjoy this kind of challenge to your grasp of the overall story, you will surely find the film exceptionally memorable visually. The landscape in which the monastery near the half-Slavic, half-Albanian village sits, overlooking Lake Ohrid or another Macedonian lake, is breath-taking. The faces will remain with you long afterwards, too. So, I fear, will the killing, though most of it is not graphic by Hollywood standards.

It's worth thinking about an implicit warning contained in the picture. Made during the Bosnian War, the film tells us (among other things) that Macedonia could come apart along ethnic lines just as Bosnia did, and for no better reason. This has not happened. What should we think of the film as a piece of social criticism?