Monday, April 9

Milcho Manchevski: “We tried to show everything as if it was real”

Challenging the years with his 1994 masterpiece Before the Rain, director Milcho Manchevski is at the festival with his new film Bikini Moon. The film is shown as part of the section “No More Flowers” which is a selection of films telling stories of headstrong women. The director talked at the screening of the film at Atlas Sineması: “The main idea in making this film was to make an experiment. I first thought about it as a documentary but then it became something like a fantasy. I tried to think about this question: “As the audience, what relation do we have with reality and documentary cinema?” The mobile phone footage or the scenes where the crew was seen were all fiction; we planned it all. And we tried to show everything as if it was real. There were parts that the camera missed. So there were gaps just like there are gaps in documentaries.” Manchevski said that their method in filmmaking was to question everything, and added that he tried to act on his instincts during the writing process and that his favorite films are usually about deep emotions.

Photo: Benek Özmez