You Won’t Believe What Happened Before

You Won’t Believe What Happened Before takes place largely in transit.

From the first moments of an ultimately tragic prologue on a dirt bike track, to its two main intersecting stories in cars heading out of Skopje, Srdjan Janicijevic’s debut film is continually on the move. Set across the course of a single evening and a few hours the following morning, the film is a lacerating look at the venality of contemporary politics showing how faith, civil obedience and idealism can all be perverted by a system bent on control and answerable to nobody. You Won’t Believe What Happened Before received its world premiere this week at Oldenburg Film Festival, and is a compulsive moral thriller that could travel widely.

The film’s premise involves a compromising and incendiary video of the Prime Minister which a small-time crook Deki (Oliver Mitkovski) has somehow got his hands on. He’s willing to shop it to the highest bidder and, as the film begins, that person is editor Bodan (Dejan Dukovski) who is well-known as an adversary of the current regime. They meet at the top of a multi-story car park where Deki hands over a flash drive with the footage on it in exchange for a bag of money before disappearing into the night. Bodan begins his negotiations with a government advisor Shute (Sasko Kocev) and begins his journey out towards a Forgiveness Sunday party that major players are apparently attending that evening. At the midpoint, the action leaves Bodan and jumps to fellow journalist Sophia (Darja Rizova) who has personal reasons for wanting to embarrass the state and who picks Deki up hoping to convince him to give her the footage.

For its first half, the film has a quality somewhat like Steven Knight’s Locke as Bodan conducts various conversations from his car – with his transgender teenage child Angel, with his wife working in a Skopje hospital, with his ex-wife, with Shute. A friend of his kid’s, Eva (Sara Sandeva) joins him in the car for a time giving some background on abuse behaviour at school and the anti-trans threats and aggravations that have been common from teachers who are aligned to the religiously conservative values of the state and have made aggressive assertions about “curing” Angel. Bodan remains a curiously ambiguous presence at the centre of all this, wanting to use the video as leverage for a meeting with the PM. The situation is a little different when the action reverts to Sophia, whose brother is gay and whose partner was recently fatally attacked by religious thugs in a night club. She is also a journalist but the drive becomes personal, not political. She’s out for blood, not leverage, and heads in the same direction as Bodan with Deki in the car – unbeknownst to her, he’s already given the drive to Bodan.

Janicijevic does a very good job of managing all of the various strands of these interwoven narratives keeping everything moving forward while remaining cogent. Often, phone screens are projected onto the composition so that both sides of the conversation can be observed. When it first happens, it might feel a little gimmicky but rather just a stylistic choice it makes the flow of multiple different conversations and machinations easier to follow. Equally, text messages ping and appear on the screen allowing for both the urgency of the situation to be escalated when required, but also for certain moments to feature torrents of social media comments or messages from across the city, which capture the mood of the place.

In the establishing shots of Skopje we see texts all across the city showing the extent of life there – from friendly banter, to intimate revelation – whereas a later scrawl of comments under a music video posted by Angel betray the vitriolic hatred of right-wing trolls. While the majority of action takes place inside the two cars, the febrile nature of the world is ever present, whether that is the danger Sophia is in as a young woman flirting with dangerous people, or the political target Bodan has on his back: a gas station attendant filling his car opening wonders why the authorities haven’t had him killed yet for his opposition. You Won’t Believe What Happened Before does a fantastic job of maintaining this air of menace which makes the actions of protagonists all the more perilous. The state of the world, in Janicijevic’s vision, is grim, but there is the sense that people still refuse to lie down, even in the face of insurmountable power.

Director: Srdjan Janicijevic
Screenplay: Dejan Dukovski, Srdjan Janicijevic, Sasho Kokalanov
Cast: Nikolai Ristanovski, Darja Rizova, Oliver Mitkovski, Sara Sandeva, Sasko Kovec
Producer(s): Saso Pesev, Mihajlo Cvetanov, Filip Dimitrov, Pece Taleski
Cinematography: Dejan Dimeski
Editing: Martin Ivanov
Music: Igor Vasilev Novogradska
Production design: Ivan Bartling
Costume design: Lidija Georgieva
Production companies: Novo Makedonsko Video, Macedonian Film Agency, New Moment – New Ideas Skopje (North Macedonia)
Venue: Oldenburg Film Festival (Independent)
In Macedonian
114 minutes

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