Milcho Manchevski returned to competition at the Tokyo International Film Festival with Sister Brother Manhole Cover, a dark comedy that received its world premiere on Oct. 30, 2026. Arriving four years after Kaymak competed at the festival, his eighth feature examines sibling love, motherhood and economic inequality through characters living on society’s margins.
Speaking to The Hollywood Reporter before the premiere, Manchevski said the story began with an interest in unconditional love between a sister and brother. Macedonian folk songs about sisters’ devotion, sometimes taking unsettling turns, helped inspire the project. He also wanted to address the divide between rich and poor, which he believes will increasingly shape society. Combining satire with an intimate portrait of the characters offered a way to explore that divide without making a film dominated by its message.
The 67-year-old filmmaker criticized what he sees as an industry preference for message-led work, describing it as a form of neo-social realism encouraged by festivals and funding bodies. He also questioned assessing films through their creators’ backgrounds, lifestyles or political circumstances. Having grown up in Yugoslavia, where access to international cinema coexisted with censorship, he said he became alert early to restrictions on artistic expression.
Manchevski said Sister Brother Manhole Cover had secured financing four years earlier but was subsequently caught in a dispute with Macedonia’s film agency. He alleged that reporting corruption in 2020 and 2022 led to his blacklisting, frozen projects, a smear campaign in the government press and criminal charges against him. According to the director, the Anti-Corruption Commission and State Audit Office confirmed his reports. He said he later won two lawsuits he brought against the agency, allowing the film’s funding to be released, while the investigation prompted by his complaints remained ongoing.
Motherhood is another recurring concern in his work, including the new film’s two mothers, one imprisoned and the other blind. Manchevski connected that persistent theme to losing his mother when he was six and a half and spending years refusing to acknowledge her death. He said such material enters his work intuitively, with its meaning becoming clearer through rewriting and rehearsals. The characters’ wrongdoing and manipulation, he suggested, reflect the contradictions that make people compelling subjects for narrative art.
During the funding conflict, Manchevski also made Good People, his first feature-length documentary, about the Macedonian nightclub fire in Kočani. Filmed a month after the tragedy, it brings together survivors, people who repeatedly entered the fire to rescue others, and victims’ relatives. He chose an austere presentation focused on their accounts of confronting death. He financed it himself, citing both his inability to access agency funding and his wish to avoid the project becoming politicized.
The two films were edited concurrently, a demanding process that he said also gave him renewed perspective on each. Good People premiered in Sarajevo, appeared at other festivals, received a theatrical run in Macedonia and aired on television. It is scheduled to screen in Torino in November. Despite making the documentary, Manchevski remains wary of claims that any single film can fully convey the truth, while acknowledging that documentaries include some of cinema’s finest work.
His prospective next project, Homecoming, follows a man who returns home to die and learns to forgive himself. Manchevski said he had revisited the idea for more than 30 years before simplifying its story, emotions and structure helped it take shape. He described it as a story with a happy ending.
