The Macedonian Film Professionals’ Association (MFPA) introduced a new festival accolade this year, the Gold Medal Аward, and the first recipient of this award by the ICFF “Manaki Brothers” was the was film critic Blagoja Kunovski Dore.
MFPA’s decision to grant no other than Blagoja Kunovski Dore this Gold Medal for his exceptional and long-standing contribution to the ICFF “Manaki Brothers” was based on facts, and the facts speak that Kunovski has not missed a single edition of the festival for 46 years, performing multiple festival functions (long-standing programmer and artistic director of the festival).

As a young film critic and journalist at Radio Skopje, he witnessed the birth of the festival, and the following year already he was hired as a host of the round table discussions held within the festival. 1995 was a key year in this mutual story of the
ICFF “Manaki Brothers” and Blagoja Kunovski Dore. That was the year when he became the festival programmer and artistic director, and the professional relationship between the two has lasted to this day.

According to Kunovski, festivals are champions for a more beautiful, more humane and dignified world to live in. And it is exactly ICFF “Manaki Brothers” story that would not have been so great and successful if it had not been for Kunovski’s
enormous contribution.

Kunovski (1946) was a long-time editor and film critic at MRTV, founder of the “Frosina” Cinema at the Skopje Youth Cultural Center (YCC) and of the Cinedays Festival of European Film. He is a member of the International Federation of Film Journalists – FIPRESCI and was the president of the Macedonian section of the federation for many years.

Kunovski is also a member of the Federation of European and Mediterranean Film Critics (FEDEORA), and is the author of thousands of articles, reviews, essays, festival reports, portraits and interviews for Macedo ian and global media outlets. At
his initiative, the International Cinematographers’ Film Festival “Manaki Brothers” in Bitola featured the most significant cinematographers at the turn of the millennia: Sven Nykvist, Jerzy Wójcik, Vadim Yusov, Miroslav Ondriček, Tonino Delli Colli, Dante Spinotti, Walter Carvalho, Vilmos Zsigmond, Chris Menges, Jaromír Šofr, Pierre Lhomme and dozens of others.

Kunovski has incorporated all these years of dedication into an excitement-filled career, and as he says himself, he is especially proud to be part of our festival, which he considers to be a very rare, perhaps even the only ambassador of Macedonian culture.