The first and third parts of the film take place in Macedonia, which, like Bosnia and Serbia, was part of Yugoslavia. The fighting has not reached there, but there is great tension between Muslims and Orthodox Christians, and the atmosphere, Manchevski feels, is heavy with anticipation and foreboding, as before a heavy rain. In the first part, an Albanian Muslim girl is suspected of having killed a Christian and takes refuge in the cell of a beardless youth who, as a monk, has taken a vow of silence. In the third segment, Aleksandar returns to his homeland to see the Muslim woman he once loved, and almost has his throat slit by her grandson.
Manchevski tells his story in a clear, ironic, elliptic style: This is like an art film about war, in which passions replace ideas.
The character of Aleksandar is the most compelling one in the film; played by Serbedzija, the best-known movie star in Yugoslavia, he has a worldly, weary attractiveness, something like Bruno Ganz in "Wings of Desire." The first and second parts of the film, while working on their own, also function as a setup for the extraordinary payoff, in which Aleksandar goes home, to find that home as he recalls it no longer exists: That childhood playmates are now bitter enemies, rehashing the details of crimes so old they are merely hearsay.
Aleksandar's return is fueled by guilt. "I killed - my camera killed - a man," he explains. While shooting in a war zone, "I complained I wasn't getting anything exciting, so a guard pulled his gun and shot his prisoner for me." He finally decides to remove himself from this circle of hatred, and Manchevski has said in interviews that the seeming "time paradoxes" in his film - the moments when things happen that shouldn't be able to happen - are his way of showing that we are perhaps not trapped by time, that sometimes there is an opening, an escape.
The construction of Manchevski's story is intended, then, to demonstrates the futility of its ancient hatreds. There are two or three moments in the film - I will not reveal them - in which hatred of others is greater than love of one's own. Imagine a culture where a man would rather kill his daughter than allow her to love a man from another culture, and you will have an idea of the depth of bitterness in this film, the insane lengths to which men can be driven by belief and prejudice.
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