EU-China Film Festival · Beijing
"Traces of Time": 2026 North Macedonia Film Panorama to Open in Beijing this June
Seven award-winning films from North Macedonia arrive in Beijing this June, opening a screen entrance to the Balkans through memory, migration, landscape, and light.
“Traces of Time”: 2026 North Macedonia Film Panorama to Open in Beijing this June
Located in the heart of the Balkan Peninsula, North Macedonia is a crossroads of diverse civilizations and historical paths. Its cinema grows out of valleys, villages, migration, and memory, observing the human condition through images that are quiet yet powerful. As cultural exchange between China and Central and Eastern Europe continues to deepen, five feature films and two short films – seven award-winning works in total – will arrive in Beijing for a focused film showcase, offering audiences a European cinematic experience rich in artistic value, regional character, and human depth.
From June 5 to 14, 2026, “Traces of Time”: 2026 North Macedonia Film Panorama will be held at Palace Cinema Beijing (Dolby Cinema, China World Mall). The panorama is co-hosted by the Embassy of the Republic of North Macedonia in China, the EU-China Film Festival, and Broadway Cinematheque Beijing. It is co-organized by Palace Cinema Beijing (Dolby Cinema, China World Mall) and EU-China Film Excellence (Hainan) International Culture Communication Co., Ltd., with BAZAAR MOVIE as the exclusive fashion media partner.
Visual Concept
Deep crimson spreads like an afterglow that has not yet faded, while gold slowly rises from the horizon.
Mountains and lakes recede into silence. The distance is no longer merely geography, but time gradually appearing on the screen.
“Traces of Time” is a metaphor for cinema. With light as its pen, cinema preserves on screen the faces, landscapes, languages, silences, and dreams of a country. It gives time a texture and gives distance a shape. A mountain road, a village, a rainstorm, a song, or a pair of watchful eyes may all become an entry point through which audiences begin to understand a land.
This panorama will present seven works: Honeyland (2019), Before the Rain (1994), DJ Ahmet (2025), Everybody Calls Redjo (2025), John Vardar vs the Galaxy (2024), and two short films, Pepi and Muto (2015) and Silent Cinema (2025).
Seven films, like seven impressions left behind by time. Together, they sketch the many faces of North Macedonian cinema: mountains and villages, cities and faraway places; rainstorms from the depths of history and music in the headphones of youth; the weight of reality and the wonders of animation; ecology and tradition, migration, diaspora, growth, and love.
For many Chinese audiences, North Macedonia may still be a distant name. Yet the meaning of cinema lies precisely in making the distant perceptible. It does not merely introduce a land or display a culture. It allows viewers to find, within other people’s stories, emotions that echo their own: attachment to home, longing for freedom, reverence for nature, questions of fate, and a tender gaze toward life itself.
From June 5 to 14, Palace Cinema Beijing will become a screen entrance to North Macedonia. Valleys touched by wind, lands watched by history, galaxies gazed upon by young people, and emotions wrapped in silence will reappear in Beijing’s early summer. In June 2026, in Beijing, deep inside the cinema screen, encounter North Macedonia.
Screening schedules, related events, and merchandise for the panorama will be announced soon. Stay tuned.
Opening Film
1. Honeyland
Awards
35th Sundance Film Festival (2019)
Grand Jury Prize – World Cinema Documentary
Tamara Kotevska / Ljubomir Stefanov
85th New York Film Critics Circle Awards (2019)
Best Documentary
Synopsis
Hatidze Muratova lives with her elderly and ailing mother in an isolated mountainous region deep in the forgotten Balkans. The village has no roads, no electricity, and no running water. She is the last heir to an ancient tradition of wild beekeeping, making small batches of honey and walking four hours to the nearest city to sell them, barely sustaining a living.
The arrival of a nomadic family disrupts Hatidze’s quiet life. They bring roaring engines, seven noisy children, and a herd of cattle. Hatidze, full of optimism, opens her heart to the possibility of change. Soon, however, conflict erupts, revealing the fundamental tensions between nature and human desire, harmony and dispute, extraction and sustainability.
Recommendation
Honeyland is the feature debut of documentary filmmakers Ljubomir Stefanov and Tamara Kotevska. It was nominated for the Academy Award for Best International Feature Film and the European Film Award for Best Documentary, among many other honors. The film unfolds with the breadth of an epic widescreen canvas, while clearly rooted in an intimate collaboration between filmmakers and subject.
With unexpected humor and a portrait that is both rough-hewn and tender, the film captures the delicate balance between humanity and nature, offers a glimpse of a rapidly disappearing way of life, and bears unforgettable witness to the resilience of an extraordinary woman. In the falling snow, after every hardship, Hatidze continues to gaze into the distance as she always has.
2. Before the Rain
Awards
51st Venice Film Festival (1994)
Golden Lion – Milcho Manchevski
FIPRESCI Prize – Milcho Manchevski
Pasinetti Award for Best Actor – Rade Šerbedžija
Synopsis
The film interweaves the stories of an Orthodox monk, played by Grégoire Colin; a British photo editor, played by Katrin Cartlidge; and a Macedonian war photographer, played by Rade Šerbedžija. During the Bosnian War, Christians in North Macedonia pursue an Albanian girl who may have killed one of their own. In London, a pregnant photo editor must have a difficult conversation with her estranged husband, only to be drawn unexpectedly into a chaotic shooting. The war photographer who returns to North Macedonia also seems to return to the story’s point of origin. Time never dies. The circle is not round.
Recommendation
Perhaps the most familiar post-Soviet-era classic of North Macedonian cinema among cinephiles, Milcho Manchevski’s Before the Rain was the first feature produced by the newly independent Republic of Macedonia. It won the Golden Lion at the 51st Venice Film Festival and was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film.
Divided into three parts, the film adopts an elliptical and subtly overlapping temporal structure. Shot during the 1990s, when the Balkan region was torn by conflict, it remains one of modern cinema’s most powerful laments on the futility of war.
3. DJ Ahmet
Awards
41st Sundance Film Festival (2025)
World Cinema Dramatic Competition – Nominee
Audience Award – World Cinema Dramatic
Georgi M. Unkovski
Synopsis
Ahmet is a 15-year-old boy from a remote Yörük village in North Macedonia. As he navigates his father’s expectations, a conservative community, and a first love who has already been promised in marriage, he finds refuge in the frenzy of a music festival.
Recommendation
At its 2025 Sundance Film Festival premiere, DJ Ahmet won major honors including the Audience Award, a World Cinema Dramatic Competition award, and a Special Jury Award for Creative Vision. The film is a charming and optimistic fable, deftly presenting Western social media as a powerful tool through which young people may find spiritual liberation within patriarchal traditions and the rural, religious communities shaped by them.
4. Everybody Calls Redjo
Synopsis
In a world where everyone is packing up and leaving, Redjo stands tall as the last guardian of the village of Slupkovo. A jack-of-all-trades with a heart of gold, Redjo keeps the village running by taking odd jobs. Yet the real showdown comes when he crosses paths with Miftar, an ambitious troublemaker. What follows is a noisy journey full of misadventures, centered on a lovable village hero whose bad luck is as comic as it is revealing.
Recommendation
In a world swept by waves of migration, only one person remains. The black comedy Everybody Calls Redjo confronts contemporary North Macedonia from an unusual angle: soaring prices, low wages, electoral corruption, official inaction, and the breakdown of the nuclear family have pushed many young people to leave for Germany. As villages hollow out, workers like Redjo spin tirelessly at the bottom of society, selling their labor wherever they can.
Through the film, audiences join the ever-busy Redjo family as the village’s “last hope.” The film asks a simple but urgent question: where are we going? It brings into focus the consequences of migration: the future lies elsewhere, and what remains is only the past.
5. John Vardar vs the Galaxy
Synopsis
A not-so-bright human is kidnapped by a narcissistic robot and turned into an exhibit in its interstellar zoo. Together, they must protect the most dangerous weapon in the galaxy and keep it from falling into evil hands. This unlikely duo sets off on a space road trip filled with aliens, monsters, black holes, and perhaps even the end of everything. With its Balkan flavor, John Vardar vs the Galaxy is a family-friendly space opera comedy.
Recommendation
John Vardar, a broke and debt-ridden odd-job worker, is kidnapped by aliens in the snow and somehow gains the greatest brain in the universe during an absurd cosmic adventure. This wildly outrageous sci-fi comedy uses intensely saturated visuals and classic American-style gags to give a down-and-out hero a chance at rebirth.
The animation style shifts with the characters’ emotions, from the rough 2D look of the early 21st century to 8-bit pixel bursts and sketch-like imagery after a black hole swallows everything. The aliens not only sing Macedonian folk songs, but also drift weightlessly through classical symphonies, paying tribute to many science-fiction classics. The film is joyful, playful, and suitable for family viewing.
As North Macedonia’s first animated feature film, John Vardar vs the Galaxy is full of boundless imagination and energetic action, while also expressing a timeless theme for the present: love one another and seek peace in the world.
Short Film 1. Pepi and Muto
Synopsis
When the clumsy rookie officer Milche joins forces with the irritable veteran detective Pepi, the city of Skopje gains an unlikely crime-fighting duo. Can Pepi and Milche bring local criminals to justice and restore peace to the city? Probably not. But their friendship may still have a chance.
Recommendation
A retired veteran detective meets a rookie novice – a classic pairing that still yields plenty of humorous moments. Pepi Mircevski, who plays the old detective, is a seasoned and highly recognizable character actor from North Macedonia, as well as a prolific “golden supporting player.” Though short in length, the film uses a genre framework to touch on the aging population and urban hollowing-out faced by Skopje, North Macedonia’s major city.
Short Film 2. Silent Cinema
Synopsis
Set in a small cinema at the end of the silent-film era, the story follows a former movie star who screens only silent films and stubbornly lives in the past. His son grows up inside this world, unaware of the dramatic changes unfolding beyond the walls. Until one unexpected discovery shakes the boy’s beliefs and fractures the already fragile bond between father and son.
Recommendation
Through imaginative stop-motion clay animation, Silent Cinema gently tells the story of a father’s “Cinema Paradiso” in the silent-film era. Presented in a single continuous shot, the film’s remarkable long-take movement guides viewers between the screen and the world beyond it, immersing them in the last golden age of silent cinema.
Adapted from an award-winning short story of the same name, the film was selected for the 2025 Annecy International Animation Film Festival, marking North Macedonia’s return to the festival after its first selection in 1977.
2026 North Macedonia Film Panorama
“Traces of Time”
Beijing
June 5 (Fri.) – June 14 (Sun.)
Screening Venue
Palace Cinema Beijing (Dolby Cinema, China World Mall)
Ticketing, exclusive events, and merchandise information will be announced soon.
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