Good People

“The Golden Lion-winner’s self-funded requiem is a strikingly spare and harrowing portrait of social collapse... strikingly austere and undecorated film... an air of mournful respect. Against expectation, the film eschews neat narratives about survival and heroism. The result is a haunting portrait of social collapse whose power is premised on the words and faces of survivors.”

“Something deeper is guiding the film… The film transitions from the reconstruction of a catastrophic night into a meditation on grief and survival, stripping away traditional tropes of the documentary genre and going in pursuit of a more nuanced depiction of a life-changing tragedy through the eyes of ordinary people who endured an unimaginable loss… This gives Good People extraordinary emotional weight, turning each testimony into a meaningful piece of a much larger discussion in which the power of community is highlighted… Manchevski chooses the simplest but most effective approach, deliberately stripping away all embellishments and presenting the information in the most direct way possible…The complete lack of additional directorial flourishes (such as music, narration or B-roll) removes any sense of interference by the filmmakers, giving the film a feeling of honesty and vulnerability, and presenting the reality of these events without mediation or unintentional manipulation of the facts by the filmmakers… Refusing to soften the reality and instead providing an in-depth exploration. An unflinching, direct depiction… A mosaic of vivid testimonies, each revealing another emotional layer… The straightforward, unfurnished style makes the film even more disconcerting and harrowing… The director’s refusal to sensationalize is admirable, since he realizes this is the only way to accurately portray not only the event itself, but the deeper impact it had on these young people who will forever carry the weight of such an experience and are never likely to fully recover from the trauma. The bare-bones, unfurnished filmmaking style may seem austere, but it is the most appropriate way to honor the people who survived by giving them the chance to process these events, as well as those who perished by honoring their memory. In both cases, they are portrayed not as merely symbols or statistics, but deeply complex individuals who experienced something inconceivable, and the film highlights their active efforts to work through the trauma. Grief is an ongoing process, and in crafting a film in which dozens of different perspectives on the same event are explored, Manchevski shows how it can be shared by an entire community. Good People takes devastating subject matter and uses it as the foundation for a moving memorial that is honest and deeply compassionate, showing the astonishing resilience of a community to work through the bleakest and most harrowing of circumstances on the path towards healing.”

“The film is completely self-funded, so the ascetic approach is as much an adaptation to the material conditions as it is a creative choice. This match is common in film history, but rarely so successful… With minimal means and maximal respect for the protagonists of his film, Manchevski developed a crucial message for the world of today. By simply observing the documentary’s protagonists and addressing your mind and feelings, he will make you painfully aware that humanity has forgotten the importance of being a good person… In this sense, the documentary Good People is a meta-discourse: through the experience of the importance of being good in a tragic accident, the director is also reflecting on his own gesture and, in general, on the importance of doing what is right. He does this by creating a suspense worthy of the best fiction. The narrative, constructed by the protagonist telling their experience of the story, unexpectedly leads to a complex conclusion. It reveals the heroic action in the background of the tragedy that is the subject of the film. It sheds new light on the director’s ethical choice to risk his career for a more transparent film financing system. It testifies to the wisdom of young people and directly speaks to each of us about a simple decision we need to make. I want to be a good person.”

“Milcho Manchevski turns the testimony of Kočani’s survivors into a quiet, devastating meditation on tragedy, corruption, and human resilience. A documentary that could easily have become an angry indictment of a broken system. Instead, it chooses something considerably more difficult—it listens. Rather than relying on sensationalism, Manchevski approaches the disaster through an old-school, raw documentary lens, allowing survivors and witnesses to tell the story in their own words… A film of remarkable restraint. There is no attempt to manufacture emotion where the reality itself is unbearable enough. No manipulative narration tells us what to feel. No swelling soundtrack instructs us when to cry. No parade of sensational images turns suffering into spectacle. The people speak. And Manchevski allows their words to carry the weight. That decision gives Good People its particular force… The film’s title is devastating precisely because of its simplicity… What makes these testimonies so powerful is Manchevski’s refusal to dramatize them. He does not need actors, reenactments, or elaborate visual effects. The survivors’ memories are enough. Their pauses, hesitation, and fragmented recollections communicate the terror more effectively than any conventional reconstruction could… Good People becomes more than a documentary about one catastrophe. It becomes an anatomy of institutional failure… Yet Manchevski wisely resists turning the film into a courtroom argument. He trusts the testimony. That trust is central to his method as a filmmaker. Having repeatedly demonstrated an interest in the moral and psychological dimensions of human behavior throughout his career, he approaches documentary not as a lesser form of filmmaking, but as a space in which reality itself can become cinematic. He refuses to decorate the suffering. He refuses to compete with the testimony. Manchevski withdraws so that others can occupy the frame… Only toward the end does the film widen its focus beyond those who survived the fire. The testimonies of grieving parents arrive as a devastating coda to what we have already heard… Their grief does not need explanation. After everything that has come before, their presence carries an almost unbearable weight… There is dignity in the way Manchevski presents them. He does not turn grief into spectacle. He simply gives these people the space to speak… There is another layer to Good People that comes from the filmmaker himself. I consider Milcho Manchevski one of the filmmakers whose work is precisely why cinema deserves to be called the seventh art. His films consistently reach beyond the events they depict, probing deeper philosophical, ethical, and psychological questions rather than simply documenting the world around us… The spoken word becomes his primary cinematic instrument. There is no need to embellish what the survivors remember; their voices, pauses and silences contain the drama. That approach also feels particularly significant given Manchevski’s own relationship with institutions. Good People was independently financed with private funds, following his prolonged conflict with the North Macedonian Film Agency and his criticism of institutional corruption. He is therefore not examining institutional failure from a safe distance. He knows what it means to confront the structures that hold power over artists and their work. And yet he makes a conscious decision not to make himself the protagonist. That may be the most revealing aspect of Good People. Manchevski’s authorship is unmistakable, but he repeatedly steps aside, allowing the young survivors—and later the grieving parents—to occupy the emotional centre of the film… There are films that document events. There are films that explain them. And then there are films that make it impossible to look at those events in quite the same way again. Good People belongs to the third category. It is a memorial, but not merely a memorial. It is an accusation, but not merely an accusation. Most importantly, it is an act of listening.”

“At the end of the screening there was no applause that would immediately break what the film had left behind. Silence remained. The applause came later.”

“The director radically challenges himself on a formal level. Good People may be the film that most clearly reveals the director's abiding commitment to starting from people (or characters, in his fiction) rather than imposing an aesthetic, ethical, social, or political framework onto their experience. Here, that act of listening becomes particularly direct and uncompromising, yielding a portrait of a community confronted with a horror whose resonance reaches far beyond the facts of the tragedy itself… The interviewees appear against a black backdrop, while black fades repeatedly interrupt the rapid succession of testimonies. These interruptions offer only the illusion of relief. In the darkness, we become even more conscious of the death closing in and of the (literally) claustrophobic nightmare endured by the more than 300 people inside the nightclub, most of them young, trapped as they tried to escape. Manchevski gives us no reconstruction, no images of the horrific scenes being described, and no visual escape to somewhere that might release the tension. Instead, our attention remains fixed on the faces, voices, and memories of those speaking: people who have lost so much, and people who could have lost everything.”

“Good People is a turning point – a kind of conceptual matrix – in the creation of contemporary Macedonian culture of memory… As an experienced director, but also an uncompromising artist, Manchevski not only made the decision to create a cinematically minimalist and ascetic work, but was also able to carry it through with restraint in the making. This raw documentary form, together with the author's gentle restraint and empathy, leaves the entire space to testimonies that are remarkably clearly articulated, open, unfiltered, and direct. And that is precisely why the film is engaged – to the core… Manchevski, whose body of work is marked by a deep interest in and exploration of the human condition, creates with Good People a complex document of humanity… It is precisely the film's delicate artistic expression, free of bombast and extraneous noise, that allows the participants' voices, faces, and body language to clearly paint the horror they lived through.”

“Paradoxically, the fire is almost the point of departure, not the destination. Manchevski does not construct a spectacular reconstruction of the night of the tragedy. He does not seek images capable of turning pain into spectacle, nor an editing scheme that transforms the event into an investigative thriller. His interest lies instead in what happens to human beings when they are suddenly thrust into an extreme situation: when normality is erased, when the fear of death becomes tangible, when a person must decide whether to seek a way out for themselves or try to save someone else… A documentary built from testimony does not simply emerge from recording a series of interviews. Relationships must be constructed between voices, silences, images, rhythms, and points of view. A form must be found that allows different experiences to become part of a shared narrative without erasing their differences. The director does not want to disappear because he has nothing to say. He wants to disappear because the people he has encountered already have something to say. His presence must be enough to make the telling possible, but not so strong that it replaces the story itself. That is an essential distinction… The film is constructed through subtraction. Superfluous commentary is removed. Explanations that viewers could find elsewhere are removed. Spectacular images are reduced. The director’s explicit presence is limited. What remains is the voice. And with the voice come hesitation, memories, emotions, details, and the inevitable contradictions of memory… And precisely because the film avoids turning these acts into spectacular images, their power increases… Good People is not simply a film about trauma. It is a film about the possibility of altruism within trauma. It is a film that asks what remains of our humanity when all the structures that normally organize our lives fall away… Manchevski does not pretend to bring the story to a close. He cannot. A tragedy of this magnitude cannot be closed by a film. But it can be told. And the telling can become a space in which individual experiences enter into relation with one another. Memory is not only what one person remembers alone. It is also what a community chooses not to forget.”

“An unflinching meditation on grief, survival, and the stubborn grace of human connection.”

"The lesson, which applies beyond the Balkans, is that testimony - that of the Kočani survivors, as well as that given by Manchevski to the authorities - remains the one act that power can never fully manipulate. Manchevski offers blunt advice to young filmmakers afraid to expose corruption: stay true to your art, but know that the only way to sleep peacefully is to speak your mind, even at a high price".

"Actually, I lack words to write about this documentary by Macedonian master Manchevski. “It’s a film that stayed with me because of the way it is made... The editing is done so it constitutes a drama, the same young people are talking to us and their sentences are broken up until they come back in the next, call it chapters, that flow elegantly from one to the next with a caption like “the outside sky” that all were longing for... There was nothing but empathy and love. The same goes for the approach of the film team - Empathy and Love. Thank you!"

"Mančevski is more interested in the moment when a person realizes that they might die. Or the moment when, despite the fear, they move toward danger in order to save someone else. Visually, the film is deliberately restrained. The idea was for the viewer not to think about the lighting, composition, or technique, but to remain with the people and their words. At a time when documentary filmmaking increasingly employs techniques borrowed from fiction films—music that underscores emotion, reenactments, voice-over, carefully constructed scenes - Good People takes the opposite approach. That “grain of hope” is neither grand nor imposed. It is not a cinematic twist that transforms tragedy into a story with a happy ending. The people who lost those closest to them did not get their lives back. Those who survived cannot erase what they saw. But their testimonies preserve the fact that, in the most difficult moments, some people tried to save others."

"Good People is one of the films that most clearly demonstrates the director's constant desire to start with the people (or characters, in the case of fiction) before any aesthetic, ethical, social, or political exploration of their experience. This listening becomes even more open and extreme here, offering us a portrait of a community confronted with a horror whose evocation reaches far beyond the news."