On March 16, 2025, a fire broke out at the Pulse nightclub in the small North Macedonian town of Kočani, injuring hundreds and killing 63 people due to burn damage, smoke inhalation and other physical traumas sustained while attendees scrambled to flee through the venue’s sole exit. The club had only one fire extinguisher and its ceiling was made of highly flammable material, while the venue’s 250-person capacity was exceeded by double the amount of people, most of them between the ages of 16 and 25.
Making its world premiere in Sarajevo’s documentary competition, Milcho Manchevski’s “Good People” leaves the broader political context to the journalists. Arriving a little over thirty years since his auspicious debut, the muscular war drama “After the Rain,” nabbed Venice’s Golden Lion, this strikingly austere and undecorated film, which Manchevski self-funded, doesn’t cover the vast institutional failures that precipitated the incident and increased its casualties. Instead, it assembles over 20 first-hand accounts by victims and witnesses, bringing to life the tragedy’s harrowing timeline through testimonies entirely. The result is a haunting portrait of social collapse whose power is premised on the words and faces of survivors.
Bookended by drone shots of the Macedonian countryside and a somber cello refrain by Novogradska, this 86-minute doc is otherwise composed of scoreless interviews with subjects seated in front of black curtains and captured in medium range. (Two brief exceptions include silent, phone-recorded footage of, first, the spark on the ceiling prior to the full break-out, and, second, an outside view of the club obscured by plumes of smoke.) The simplicity of the setup simplicity pays respect to the memory of the fallen, refusing to sensationalize the events or cater to morbid curiosity — principles that have dictated a long tradition of documentary filmmaking that privileges oral testimony, like Claude Lanzmann’s “Shoah” and Chantal Akerman’s “Tell Me.”
But unlike those long take-heavy films, “Good People” cuts frequently between its subjects, a chorus-like effect that is sometimes choppy as editor Mishko Chunikhin flits between longer memories and observations as short as a few words. The doc starts out by describing the club’s downward spiral, with survivors — some of whose burn marks you can observe on their necks and hands — sharing eerily similar experiences. The beginning of the fire was widely mistaken as a special effect put on by the pop group performing at the time, and the flames spread quicker than clubbers could realize what was happening.
“My eyes were seeing so many things that my brain couldn’t process,” says one of the more eloquent speakers, a young woman with shell-shocked eyes and flat-ironed hair who lost all of her friends in the incident. Proceeding chronologically through the night, the speakers recall navigating the chaos of people rushing toward the exit; and how this fatal stampede, along with asphyxiating conditions, knocked people unconscious, creating a “carpet of dead kids” under which more people were trapped and sometimes killed by suffocation, all while “burning alive.”
Frequent fades to black and plain intertitles, displaying pithy phrases drawn from the interviews (like “that’s it” and “like helpless animals”), allow for moments of silence, encouraging the subjects’ words to soak in. These pauses also give the documentary an air of mournful respect, making its pace more deliberate than the standard talking heads-doc that might be mistaken as a stylistic counterpart.
The second half introduces some parents of survivors and interviews with a handful of locals and early escapees who (re-)entered the club to help pull out injured bodies. The doc’s tagline — “when good people burn in hell” — comes off more than a bit crude, but the descriptions of people running out of the club burned and naked, their clothes and shoes torn off in the push to escape; or victims with bodies hot to the touch, their skin melting and ripping off the bone as rescuers pull them out from beneath piles of corpses, certainly justifies the metaphor. Against expectation, the film eschews neat narratives about survival and heroism. Ethics and normal human behavior are subsumed by “pure animal instinct” and “kicking, clawing, and biting.”
If this doesn’t seem like a gracious revelation, there’s a point to the deep horror that Manchevski draws out here. As one subject explains, she feels “indignity” to have been violated so deeply by what she endured and witnessed. “Good People” may not explore the structural inadequacies that allowed this catastrophe to happen, but it does remind us of the ease with which our modern world can slide back into medieval times — and the responsibility we have to prevent it.
