Stavitza is a village of houses and walls built of stone, three hours by car from Skopje, ancient and beautiful. It is situated on a plateau surrounded by bushes, firs, but also grey rocks and pointed and bare altitudes. In the center there is a sheep-fold in which groups of sheep are moving.

Milcho Manchevski, the Macedonian director, who was awarded with the Golden Lion of Venice for Before the Rain, is just about to shoot Dust, a film starting in present New York where an old woman tells a story which goes back to another world and another time, to Macedonia at the beginning of this century, when the Ottoman ruler recruited traders to spy the nationalistic explosions of the various ethnical groups in the Balkan.

A coproduction of England (Chris Auty), Germany (Vesna Jovanoska), Italy (Domenico Procacci) and Macedonia, Dust, which will be distributed by Medusa, is a film with a 10 million dollar budget, 12 weeks of filming (of which 6 are still left), a group of 180 persons of 13 different nationalities (among them Americans, Albanians, Croatians, Serbs and Bulgarians who cooperate without any tensions), a beautiful cast with Joseph Fiennes, the Australian David Wenham (he was in The Boys at the side of Nicole Kidman "the best Australian actor of the past 10 years"), Adrian Lester (Love's Labour's Lost) and Anne Brochet (All the Mornings of the World). A western in the East, a hommage to Peckinpah, the course of a story which passes from one story-teller to the next, changes and enriches itself with the imagination of which it tells.

Milcho Manchevski defines "Dust" like this: "The movie is about persons who want to let go things when they don't know about them anymore (?), a photo, a story, a child, the memory of a nice gesture or a mean action. It is a film about the things we carry with us, what we bear on our shoulders. A movie about memories, though I think that it is much easier to reproduce own memory in literature than in cinema."

It is a film in which people fight and die, it takes place in Macedonia at the beginning of this century, but its applicability to the current situation on the Balkan is obvious.

"I have made a long research, read books and testimonies about the wars of 100 years ago. I found out that all wars are similar in this part of the world, you are fighting about a piece of land in order to steal it because of the insanity of a psychopathic regime. There is no difference between all the wars in the world and the latest Balkan conflicts, except that they broke out when the rest of the world apparently lived in peace and TV presented it to the world."

Question to Milcho Manchevski:
In "Dust" Elijah and Luke are brothers who fight on opposite frontiers in war: Are those archetypal figures?

Answer:
"I hope that they are above all persons with emotions the audience can identify with, although they might see them symbolically. But an archetypal story wouldn't work."

Question to Milcho Manchevski:
This first movie was a political movie. Will Dust also be one?

Answer:
"In another way. The political film is important but it is not art. Penicillin is important too but nobody says it is art."

THE ACTOR
Joseph Fiennes is Elijah who leaves Arizona behind for the East.

Hollywood? His home is Europe.
He is no longer the younger brother (of seven years) of Ralph Fiennes, he is Joseph Fiennes and that is enough, the young Shakespeare in Love, a part which made him known and won him Hollywood's interest. But inspite of the best film offers from the States, Fiennes has chosen a difficult role in which he, clad in a rudimentary woollen uniform, is exposed to the gun-smoke of the war in the mountains.

"I had seen Before the Rain and suddenly wanted to work with Manchevski, I like his conception of cinema, his vision. And it is a beautiful idea of a Western in the East," says Fiennes, who in Dust plays Elijah, Luke's brother. A youth in Arizona, then they fall in love with the same woman, Elijah marries her, Luke departs to the East. Later Elijah meets him again.

"They meet in the same geographical and human landscape of the West, a region of conflicts and war. It's a story of redemption and blood revenge, without heroes," says Fiennes who before Dust has played in Annaud's Enemy at the Gates. "It's a film about the battle of Stalingrad. I am Danilov, a young political officer who works for the KGB and maintains an ambiguous friendship with a young soldier, Jude Law. It is another war, another horror, another way of learning about Europe's past."