From an Interview with Goran Stefanovski, May 2000

On Migration and Identity

In a hotel room I'm neither here nor there, I don't know who's above or below. I wonder, did they give me a good room? It's a liminal space between fact and fiction, a place where I have a crisis of my story. One man's ceiling is another man's floor. Below and above the luxurious apartments, illegals are staying in the laundry because a cousin works there, staying on the roof. According to the Brussels police, 8 million immigrants have been caught in the last few years entering Western Europe--they represent an invisible republic. Most of them aren't narcos; they're like Charlie Chaplin in The Gold Rush, unaccommodated men, without an embassy. Pulverized people, thrown out of the window, all such constructs as personal identity and social cohesion gone, leaving a void.

On Interculturalism

My professional vocation for a long time was to be a bridge between my world and your world. Then all of a sudden I was in England, where everyone speaks English, and I was like the bridge in Avignon, not bridging anything. I'd like to try to find money to show Hotel Europa in the East and see what kind of debate it would create, but how fruitful would such an effort be? The moment you move to Western Europe to create a project, you have disqualified yourself in Macedonia or any Eastern country. They think it's European wheeling and dealing and some kind of plot. They think you're MGM and should be doling out dollars. Sometimes I wonder how effective these coproductions are. I'll tackle the real challenge to the West in Hotel Europa Two, and do it first in Skopje: a hotel full of Americans, full of UN people, full of journalists, businessmen, NGOs, humanitarian activists. Then I'll take it to Vienna.

On Writing about the Yugoslav Wars

Politicians try to tell us that war is a melodrama, because in melodrama someone else is always guilty for your troubles; you're the innocent lamb. I don't like that genre. So I started reading Euripides again after twenty years. I reread The Bacchae and realized that that is what happened to me. Pentheus is a cocky rational young prince who won't accept the existence of anything like a Dionysian rite, so his mother eats him alive. When I first went to the West, I thought that Yugoslavia was already utopia on the ground, achieved. I was nineteen. A couple of years later, in the 1970s, I came back for a visit and my uncle asked me, "What do they say in the West, is there going to be another war?" I thought, how unfashionable this man is, why this paranoia? Whenever I came back, he asked the same thing, and as time went by his questions became more and more sinister and my answers less and less convincing. He was like Tieresias. So I rewrote The Bacchae and called it Bacchanalia. The Dionysian rites were danced by men in the Balkans. That's how it happens there, not only in my play.

On Women's Roles

Ivana is a girl who won't accept this soap opera as her play, the big soap opera stereotype accepted by both Easterners and the West. So she shoots Igor six times and can't kill him--the machismo in my part of the world will not expire as quickly as I want. In collectivism of any sort, tribal patriarchal society, there's no space for women. And no women directors. Anyway, Chris [Torch, the producer] apologized for that, and we have local women directors for the local transitional sections. You know, the prostitute scene has girl power, and so does the girl who comes to shoot the man who killed her brother, though I didn't write that character as a...