Dir. Milcho Manchevski | North Macedonia
As the wacky title suggests, there is something gloriously off-kilter about the world of Sister Brother Manhole Cover, Milcho Manchevski’s darkly comic, sharply observed drama about survival at the bottom of the social ladder. Set in Skopje, the film follows Malina and Viktor, two siblings scraping by on the proceeds of stealing bronze busts of national heroes and selling them for scrap. It is an ingenious, irreverent enterprise – until one particularly disastrous theft leaves Viktor seriously injured and his sister negotiating a dangerous bargain with a corrupt doctor.
What follows is an unpredictable excursion into a society where the price of survival is measured not simply in money but in compromised principles. Manchevski finds rich comic possibilities in the absurdity of his protagonists’ predicament, but there is a harder edge beneath the humour. The bronze heroes may be disappearing from their pedestals, yet the corruption and hypocrisy of the living are considerably harder to shift.
Rather than sentimentalising its dispossessed protagonists, the filmmaker gives their relationship an appealingly unruly humanity. Malina’s desperate resourcefulness and Viktor’s vulnerability become the emotional fulcrum of a story that moves between grotesque comedy, social indignation and moments of unexpected tenderness. The siblings inhabit a world in which dignity is routinely bartered, but their loyalty to one another remains stubbornly intact.
Sara Klimoska and Filip Trajković bring the film its essential emotional charge, supported by a strong ensemble including Sonja Mihajlova, Petar Mirčevski, Dejan Lilić and Jordan Simonov. Their performances help anchor a narrative whose eccentric turns never entirely obscure its compassionate heart.
For Manchevski, whose Before the Rain won Venice’s Golden Lion in 1994 and announced him as one of the most distinctive voices in contemporary Balkan cinema, this is familiar territory: fractured societies, moral ambiguity and individuals caught between personal survival and collective dysfunction. But Sister Brother Manhole Cover approaches these concerns with a more mischievous, street-level energy, finding an unlikely poetry in the discarded and overlooked.
A film about stealing national treasures that ultimately discovers its greatest treasure in an intensely human bond, Sister Brother Manhole Cover is a lively, bittersweet reminder that compassion can survive even where almost everything else has been put up for scrap.
TOKYO GRAND PRIX AWARD 2026