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Exploring the life and work of filmmaker Milcho Manchevski, this ethnography offers an intimate account of artistic practice, integrity, and independence. The author provides an insider’s perspective on Manchevski’s wars of independence, examining the challenges posed by nepotism, prejudice, corruption, the turbulence of Macedonian history, Hollywood, and the political economy of filmmaking. This book traces the struggles involved in creating films that remain committed to artistic freedom while navigating competing political, social, and commercial pressures.
"This work is an original and interesting contribution to anthropology and film studies, it is also relevant to the study of popular culture." — Victor A. Friedman, University of Chicago
"Milcho Manchevski’s life and work have been intimately bound up with culture, politics, and society in his native Macedonia, across local and far-flung national borders, and in context of the dominant US film industry. Neofotistos has produced an excellent intimate ethnography of Manchevski, an important, transnational filmmaker whose life is well worth examining." — Victor A. Friedman, co-author of The Balkan Languages
"In Vasiliki Neofotistos’s truly elegantly written intimate ethnography, Manchevski remains uncompromisingly standing in a vertical position. With his film-aesthetic achievements an indisputable legacy, Neofotistos captures in Standing Tall the personal, modest and sensitive aspects of Manchevski’s persona, revealing the importance of remaining faithful and loyal to the dream even when the path is uncertain, and even when it is obstructed by injustices. Manchevski shares his understanding of the world as art, and Neofotistos shares his story in this book because this world needs both so very much." — Sofija Grandakovska, author of The Jews from Macedonia and the Holocaust: History, Theory, Culture
"Standing Tall is an engaging, fascinating account of Macedonian filmmaker Milcho Manchevski’s often fraught experiences that take him from Skopje to New York and Hollywood. Covering totally new ground, anthropologist Vasiliki Neofotistos provides valuable insights into the tensions, compromises, and conflicts between artistic goals and political and economic realities." — Loring Danforth, author of The Macedonian Conflict: Ethnic Nationalism in a Transnational World
Vasiliki P. Neofotistos is Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University at Buffalo, The State University of New York. She is the author of The Risk of War: Everyday Sociality in the Republic of Macedonia (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012) and editor of Macedonia and Identity Politics after the Prespa Agreement (Routledge, 2021).