The Third Half

During the Second World War a football club in Macedonia ends up in the Bulgarian league once the country falls under Axis occupation. The team is coached by a Jewish trainer. A love story runs alongside it: Kosta, who is Orthodox, and Rebecca, the daughter of a wealthy Jewish family. Behind all of it stands the deportation of the Jews of Macedonia. Darko Mitrevski's film starts from the story of a real coach. The Macedonian state treated the production as a matter of national interest and put a million euros into it, and the film was sent as the country's Oscar entry. That frame is worth knowing while watching: this is a nation telling its own history.