The beginnings of film making art in Macedonia and Balkans

In the last years of the 19th century, in 1895 Lumieres Brothers had their first film projection at the Grand Café in Paris, France.
At the beginning of the last century Macedonia was still under Ottoman Empire.

Even though, two years after the Lumieres Brothers, Skopje- the capital and Bitola, the second biggest city in Macedonia  for the first time enjoyed the excitement the motion pictures has to offer.

Bitola 1905. Only a decade after the Lumieres, another two brothers Milton and Janaki Manaki both photographers, travelling through Europe, bought and brought the first camera on the Balkans -“the devil’s box” as they called it, Bioscope 300, from the company called  Charles Urban Trading co. based in London, UK. The first moving image they produced was that of their 114 years old grandmother Despina in the yard of their family house in Avdela, Aegean Macedonia. And those were the first moving images on the Balkans. It all started from there…

Most of their productive life Manakis spent in Bitola, at the time prominent city of many consulates and sophisticated people. And there they drew their inspiration to leave a timeless piece of history for generations to come.
The 20th century brought immense development in the art and cultural fields. This affected the world cinematography in the most enriching way.  Manakis proved that the magical world of the film can be timeless in many ways. The way they produced the films showed great expertise and sense for the film medium. They left invaluable testimony of their time, traditions, customs and history.

The significance of their photographic and cinematographic material can only be compared with the one produced by the Lumieres brothers. They left considerable number of photographs, around 18.000 and nearly 2500 meters of film materials. The film material was transferred to a 35mm film tape in 1950 and preserved in a Budapest laboratory in 1995, now kept at the Macedonian Film Library depots.