Before the rain

Crane Beach, MA (Jun 26, 2005)

Today it rained. It suddenly got dark, in the middle of the morning, as the thunderstorm clouds were covering the sky. Coming from the south, first enshrouding the high rise downtown buildings, and then progressively changing the sky from blue to dark gray. Then it poured down as only summer knows. We are getting a lot of these, this summer.

I shot this photo the same day of the running kid, just before it actually started to rain. The calm before the tempest, as they say. It wasn’t very calm, after all, you can see the storm approaching.

You usually do, before the rain starts, like in the movie by Milcho Manchevski. The movie came out in 1994, when I was in Trieste the first year of my graduate school studies. Those were the years of the war in the ex Yugoslavia. I was there, few miles from the border, listening to the souls fleeing from the war, transiting in the cheap youth hostel I was living in. I remember two kids that I met there, one serbian and one bosnian, running away from their respective countries to avoid the draft. They should have been enemies, shooting at each other in that ethnic hell, but they were just two kids traveling together, back and forth between Austria and Italy. They didn’t have a proper visa for any of the two countries, so they couldn’t stay more than a few weeks in the same place. Each time their touristic visa was expiring they had to cross the border, and start again on the other side for another few weeks spell. And they were the lucky ones, with parents having enough money to finance this crazy ping-pong game played against the war.

Others weren’t so lucky, like the bosnian art teacher that escaped with his whole class and his paintings from Sarajevo, defying the sharpshooters with the cover of the night. I asked him what he was planning to do next. He told me that he wanted to go back to Sarajevo, because even if he thought he could outrun the war, he now realized that the war would be inside him forever, and there was no point in living in any other place while his country and his family were being destroyed by this insanity.

The movie came out while Croatia, Bosnia and Serbia were being consumed by the demons that we all thought were buried in Nuremberg once and for all. The movie is about Macedonia, a part of Yugoslavia at the time still untouched by the war, and is about the conflict between ethnic macedonian and the albanian minority, still burning under the surface after centuries of difficult cohabitation. The movie starts and ends with the same scene, a thunderstorm approaching, and leads the viewer through a circular story whose chilling ineluctability is apparent to everybody, but is impossible to stop.

You usually see the storm approaching. Before it rains.