Milcho Manchevski, the North Macedonian director whose 1994 debut “Before the Rain” won Venice’s Golden Lion and earned an Oscar nomination, is back in competition at the Tokyo International Film Festival with “Sister Brother Manhole Cover,” a project stalled for years after he accused his country’s film agency of corruption. The dark comedy centers on Malina and Viktor, a sister and brother getting by on the fringes of post-Communist Macedonia by pilfering busts of national heroes cast in bronze, along with manhole covers, and selling off the metal. When a job goes wrong and Viktor is seriously hurt, Malina cuts a deal with a crooked doctor.
The siblings end up on the run, and eventually take shelter with the doctor’s wealthy mother, Todora, who is blind. Of Malina and Viktor, he says: “They are far from ideal people. But they are deserving of understanding and affection.
I am interested in people as they are, with their contradictions, not as examples of how people should behave. Idealized characters make for bad movies.” The siblings break the law and sometimes make terrible mistakes, but Manchevski says he had no wish to turn them into objects of pity. He sees the pair’s refusal to think of themselves as victims as a way of reclaiming their own story.
It is painful and dehumanizing,” he says. The circumstances that shape these lives are real, and they are political.” For Manchevski, the busts stand for the values a society claims to honor while it abandons people like Malina and Viktor. The manhole covers are a plainer matter: everyday infrastructure that turns into a hazard the moment it disappears.
Still, he adds, the covers “keep a lid on the ugliness of society, on its septic underground” until someone pries them loose. Manchevski says he follows the characters and story rather than picking a genre in advance. They can be cruel and generous, ridiculous and moving,” he says.
The film unfolds in two movements. The first trails the siblings through a rough and unpredictable world; the second tightens its focus on their inner lives. This marks Manchevski’s fourth time at the Tokyo festival; his previous feature, “Kaymak,” played in competition in 2022.
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