MILCHO MANCHEVSKI: Good People
Actually, I lack words to write about this documentary by Macedonian master Manchevski, director of fiction films, who decided to make a documentary that takes its subject from the horrible tragic fire in a disco in the small town Kocani on 16 March 2025, where 63 young people died.
It’s a film that stayed with me because of the way it is made. Manchevski decided to invite survivers and witnesses to put words on what they experienced, when everybody wanted to get out of the disco house at the same time, haunted by the flames. As he said in an interview – we started talking to survivors already one month after the incident and we decided that this is their film…
… from the moment the disco guests all thought that what happened was part of a light show with effects, until they understood that it was a fire that spread at a horrifying speed. Deadly quickly. Very brief video shots are breaking into the talking faces on a black background, no sound, just images from the disco and the smoke coming from the house. The story construction, the content of the images from the inferno are made by the spectator through the words coming from the young people, who got out. In our heads.
For many after having been involved in a stampede, “like helpless animals” it is phrased by one, or by being on top of others, fighting to get out. “Mom, I love you, Goodbye”, a girl managed to say to her mobile phone… She survived and as many she went in again to help, youngsters they did not know or close friends. Survivers. Heroes.
The editing is done so it constitutes a drama, the same young people are talking to us and their sentences are broken up until they come back in the next, call it chapters, that flow elegantly from one to the next with a caption like “the outside sky” that all were longing for.
Look at the photo of the review – the girl to the right is a very strong storyteller, who experienced so much, when she was carrying out kids in her arms taking their pulse. She tells us that some time after she could not – as she used to do – take up her nephew to her arms, she went to a psychologist, who told her that she should think about all the ones she had held in her arms – conveying the warmth from them. She is also the one, who characterizes the atmosphere After, in meetings, “there was nothing but empathy and love”.
The same goes for the approach of the film team – Empathy and Love. Thank you!
North Macedonia, 2026, 82 mins.
❤️ ❤️ ❤️ ❤️ ❤️ ❤️
