Good People

"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."