The film's narrative shifts between London and the Macedonian countryside, with the main thread following a war photographer who returns home after Yugoslavia has split into multiple nations to find that his homeland has been decimated by war. Actor Rade Serbedzija was himself one of Yugoslavia's most beloved actors for over two decades and refused to take a side in the violent conflict that tore his homeland apart, which made him an ideal choice to cast as the film's lead. He fled Belgrade in 1992 with his wife and newborn daughter, leaving behind a career that included a legendary 1974 performance as Hamlet on stage.
One of the many admirers of Serbedzija's craft was the film's first-time director, Macedonian-born Milcho Manchevski, who grew up watching Serbedzija in plays and films and called him "one of the sweetest people I've ever worked with" in a Los Angeles Times interview on February 28, 1995. "Rade has a big heart, and there's a lot of suffering in his face - he's an odd combination of the old-fashioned romantic and something sort of beastly, and I think that's the essence of his appeal."
Manchevski was educated at Southern Illinois University after leaving his native country and made New York his home for many years, making commercials, music videos, and documentaries. He had already won the 1992 MTV award for best rap video for Arrested Development's "Tennessee," an homage to Diane Arbus and Robert Frank, when he embarked on this film, written in a week after gestating in his mind for a year.
Though Manchevski was the writer-director's ideal leading man, the female lead proved to be a bit trickier to cast. The late Katrin Cartlidge, who had just starred in Mike Leigh's Naked and would go on to appear in Breaking the Waves (1996), was ultimately cast as Anne, and she would later return to similar territory with the Bosnian war drama No Man's Land (2001). However, previous casting announcements for the role included a May 7, 1993 item about Natasha Richardson in Back Stage and subsequent names like Charlotte Gainsbourg and Amanda Donahoe listed the following June.
The real-life 1989 collapse of Yugoslavia when the Communist Party lost power had fractured the area into five countries by 1992, which had a life-changing impact on Serbedzija. "I'm a Serb born in Croatia," he told the Los Angeles Times, "and my language, mentality and culture are Serbo-Croatian. As an actor I worked all over Yugoslavia for audiences of all background... I did what I could to stop the war. I attended meetings, spoke on television and wrote poems and songs protesting nationalism. Because of those activities and because I refused to take sides, both the Serbs and the Croats hate me now and that's why I had to leave."
The decision to shoot on location proved to be a challenge as well, something Manchevski likely anticipated when he wrote the script (which was penned in English, then translated back to Macedonian). The crew spoke ten different languages and had to build its own roads for many of the inaccessible locations, which accounted for a large part of the $2.5 million budget (nearly scuttled when the UK's Channel Four pulled out after production had commenced, with British Screen stepping in at the last minute). "I was concerned that people would be upset with me," said Manchevski in a February 21, 1995 interview for Voice. "Some people said, 'We don't all live in run-down villages, we also drive Mercedes cars. Why didn't you show that? But most of them read the film just as I wanted them to, which is as a warning."
Before the Rain was picked up by Gramercy in October of 1994 after winning the Gold Lion at the Venice Film Festival in September, 1994, beating out competition like Natural Born Killers (with a jury including none other than David Lynch). The film also made a splash at the Sundance Film Festival (the same one that famously included Pulp Fiction), and earned a big supporter in Janet Maslin, whose review was widely circulated to promote the film (which was theatrically released via Polygram Film International Classics).
However, one of the film's biggest controversies was yet to come with its Oscar nomination when the Academy classified it as a submission from "the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia." This politically-charged designation caused Manchevski, several government officials, and the cast and crew to protest. (The name of Macedonia was being contested by Greece at the time, who claimed its people owned that designation.) A compromise of sorts appeared during the actual telecast (in which Russia took home the award for Burnt by the Sun) when presenter Jeremy Irons disregarded the classification and simply referred to the film as being from "Macedonia," a naming dispute that continues to this day.
By Nathaniel Thompson
