High-resolution images from the movie can be found here
Bavaria Film International also premieres SILENT RESIDENT, BLIND and ENCARNACIÓN With three World Premieres, one International Premiere and four films from Cannes and Berlin, Bavaria Film ...
“ambitious and capably mounted […] (Manchevski) retains a very fine eye for composition, aided by the sensuous, beautiful work of Italian cinematographer Fabio Cianchetti. The movie´s standout quality is the sexy, revealing work of the vibrant, highly alluring young actress Vesna Stanojevska, a professional musician making her film debut. She injects the film with an erotic intensity”
Patrick McGavin, Screen Daily
„Manchevski is building a body of work that will shine in retrospective programs—for shared, reverberating landscapes, elaborated images, and a cadre of supporting actors whose reappearance in successive film makes his work subliminally familiar and easy to enter—and now, for the clarity of his turn into newly personal territory and straightforward narrative.
Manchevski’s images are earthy, specific, free of arid abstraction.
Manchevski tinkered for several years with the nuances of his film’s title, beginning with the Ghosts and detouring to Bones before settling on the immensely resonant possibilities of Shadows. The word’s added visual dimension encourages our attention toward DP Fabio Cianchetti’s use of reflections, doubling, broken space, and Menka’s propensity for suddenly dropping out of the frame mid-stride and then abruptly reappearing. Cities in Manchevski’s films have always been claustrophobic and disorienting. There’s a similar handling in that maze-like Paris apartment where Bertolucci’s The Dreamers occurs, a film Cianchetti also shot.“
Nancy Keefe Rhodes, Stylusmagazine.com
“Shadows is Milcho Manchevski’s most ambitious film to date, a mysterious, at times elusive work that delves into the mind of a young doctor whose life is turned upside down when he is involved in a car accident. There is a surreal and nightmarish quality to Shadows, Manchevski’s impressive attempt to capture the zeitgeist of his homeland. Confused and troubled, Lazar is perhaps a metaphor for Macedonia, a country that has lived through trauma and is trying to put the pieces back together. A modern-day Lazarus returned from the dead, Lazar tries to make sense of a world that evades rational comprehension. This fascinating exploration of an interior state of mind provides a compelling look into a lost man trying to find his way home again.”
Piers Handling, Toronto Int. Film Festival
“The film succeeds in setting a chilling tone, and presents some moments of genuine suspense […] Shadows at once raises concerns for traditional cultural practices — such as reverence for the dead, the importance of the family structure — while also revealing a more pointed examination of war and reconstruction. With scenes of Day of the Dead festivities (in which death and rebirth are celebrated, and the lost souls who are prevented – for various reasons – from seeking peaceful rest return), it´s clear that these cast-off peoples are the shadows who, in life as in death, fit uneasily within the new civic order, promising to haunt the living world endlessly until their call for social justice is heeded.”
Davida Aronovitch, Ukula.com
“´Shadows´ is a confection of images, evoked smells, fascinating faces, pitch-perfect acting, and unnerving events--with perhaps the best crash scene I have ever seen in film. My observation re: the accident might sound like hyperbole, but the psychology of the scene is sheer perfection. Its details are choice.”
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