Goran Trenchovski’s impressive feature film The Golden Five will be premiering in the USA at the New Jersey Film Festival on Friday, September 22!
Here is my interview with The Golden Five Director Goran Trenchovski:
Nigrin: Your profound and moving feature film The Golden Five is about a dark chapter in the history of your native land of Macedonia. Please tell our readers what your film is about and why you decided to make it
Trenchovski: The Golden Five is inspired by an unprecedented crime was committed upon five beautiful young souls, progressive students; a case that has long been considered to have no official version in the Balkans. But we had our own, cinematic view of the plot, and through a free artistic interpretation we set up the riddle, why were the students killed and which kind of moral paths are those few who are unworthy remembering those absurd times passing through. Throughout the cinematic action, we have focused on: the insidious betrayal, the pain of broken love, and the meeting with one possible confession. Therefore, The Golden Five is not completely historical or epic. It is very modern movie about our dark and suppressed “yesterday”, a movie that illuminates and talks about things that have been forbidden literally till the present day.
Nigrin: The entire cast of The Golden Five is terrific but the lead actors are stellar. Tell us about these wonderful actors and how you decided to cast them.
Trenchovski: There are mainly two generations of actors in the movie: famous actors with extensive experience at the front of the camera, as well as debutants who get their first roles. It was really a challenge to shoot simultaneously with the famous Slavko Shtimac, and the young ones who were selected at the casting. The filmed truth that we created as a generation of film authors and as a crew which is expressing itself from the aspect of the present, is presented with a great desire to make a movie by which the myth emerges from the aura of controversy. We spoke about the leadership and the open-minded spirit of the young five: Maki, Toni, Leva, Krap and Bistri, under whose codenames the notorious secret services of the communist regime kept special dossiers that are almost completely destroyed today. The actors I worked with were brave, eloquent and hard-working creative people, and they all invested a great enthusiasm and professionalism during the shooting of this movie.
Nigrin: The cinematography is also a star in your film as your film has some really painterly images. Tell us about more your Director of Photography and how you decided to give your film an authentic 1950s look.
Trenchovski: The movie incorporates a specific optics, with a rich sonorous image, through the suggestive camera lens through which we enter the narrator's interesting story. The aesthetic and visual credo of “Golden Five” implies a warm, direct and unpretentious hyper-real filmic expression. The scenes contain measured and accurate energy charge, with unhidden emotionality and variety of protagonists. Finally, this is a movie for all of us born somewhere in the 20th century, in a world without any kind of divisions. It is made with a very frank, discreet and direct authorial approach, in order to point out vividly the malevolence and the virtues, but with the thought that tomorrow is a new day, and we will have to look again into each other’s eyes.
Nigrin: Are there any memorable stories while you made this film or any other info about your film you can rely to our readers?
Trenchovski: The five students were very loved and respectable, were polyglots, they read pro-Western literature, and were therefore an eyesore to the local authorities. They listened to jazz, regularly went to the theatre and cinema, and were preparing to watch the film adaptation of “American Tragedy” by Dreiser, the movie “A Place in the Sun” with Liz Taylor. Unfortunately, they did not survive to watch the movie at the Strumica Cinema that fatal summer. Their young lives were violently taken away just one day before the world premiere of the George Stevens' movie (the screening was on August 14, but the five students was murdered on August 13, 1951)... My movie is largely a narrative of the kindness that should be an antipode to the accumulated evil and should prove that no dark force in the world is eternal.
Here is the trailer for The Golden Five:
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The Golden Five will be preceded by Don P. Hooper’s tasty short film Page One. Here is more info on this screening:
Page One – Don P. Hooper (Brooklyn, New York) When veteran actor Abel Worthy suspects real danger on his latest film set, bloodthirsty creatures force him to step into the role he was destined to play. 2017; 8 min. With an introduction and Q+A session with Director Don P. Hooper and Producer LeMar McLean!
The Golden Five – Goran Trenchovski (Skopje, Macedonia) Director Goran Trenchovski returns to a dark chapter in the history of his native land of Macedonia, in this intimate feature film about the bonds of friendship, tested by unacknowledged acts of betrayal. The film centers on the lives of three loyal friends, Maki, Kata and Jiji, who believe in their youthful ideals. When Maki is murdered, along with four other students, during a period of communist liquidations, his murder remains unsolved. Half a century later, a witness and a researcher, named Alavantie, returns to his homeland with the "Golden Five" dossier. The secrets he reveals will upend Kata's and Jiji's lives. In Macedonian, subtitled. 2016; 83 min. With an introduction and Q+A session with Director Goran Trenchovski!
Friday, September 22, 2017 at 7:00 p.m.
Voorhees Hall #105/Rutgers University
71 Hamilton Street, New Brunswick, New Jersey
$12=General; $10=Students+Seniors; $9=Rutgers Film Co-op Friends
Information: (848) 932-8482; www.njfilmfest.com
Jimmy John’s of New Brunswick will be providing free food prior to this New Jersey Film Festival Screenings!
