MOVIES : From the Ashes of a Ravaged Land : An accidental detour pays big dividends for ‘Rain’ director Milcho Manchevski, who finds similarities in Macedonia and Tennessee.

A video of the 1992 Arrested Development rap song “Tennessee” would seem to be worlds apart from European art-house fare like “Before the Rain,” which opened Friday. But they have one thing in common: director Milcho Manchevski.

The 35-year-old Macedonian-born filmmaker has won awards for both efforts. The video copped the 1992 MTV award for best rap video and a similar acknowledgment from Billboard magazine. The elegiac “Before the Rain,” Manchevski’s first film, which deals with strife in his native Macedonia (part of the former Yugoslavia), shared the Golden Lion for best film at last year’s Venice Film Festival. It was nominated for a Golden Globe for best foreign film and was the first movie from his country to be nominated for a best foreign film Oscar.

For Manchevski, the only “superficial difference” between the two works is that “one is about Tennessee and the other, Macedonia. Both speak to the same kind of despair in the collective experience. And both are very visually thought out.”

“Tennessee” is a reaction to the slickness and facile qualities of most music videos, and is a homage to Depression-era photography and to the work of Robert Frank and Diane Arbus. “Before the Rain” is even more classical in structure, the synthesis of several days’ “opening our minds” in the Louvre, where Manchevski, his cinematographer and production designer roamed the halls in search of inspiration.

Manchevski’s music video career itself was an accidental detour on his way to making films, but turned out to be a rigorous preparation for his filmmaking debut.

After graduating from Southern Illinois University in the early ‘80s, he tried to raise money for one of his early scripts, the tale of a young actress. He shot a segment of the script, an imaginary commercial for a perfume called Possession. The film was never made, but the fictitious commercial landed him real commercial work and stints directing music videos for performers including Sonia Braga, Black Sheep and Widowmaker.

“For me, music videos were an extension of experimental film. After all, Kenneth Anger was doing (this kind of work) 20 years before MTV and non-linear storytelling has been around in literature since James Joyce.”

Unlike many music video and commercial directors, Manchevski tried to avoid the pitfalls of becoming too visually slick and emotionally uninvolving. “Music videos often become less about people and more about background.”

The circular narrative of “Before the Rain” tells three interwoven stories like Quentin Tarantino’s “Pulp Fiction,” and has fabulist elements in common with the films of Krzystof Kieslowski.

“In film, Tarantino and Kieslowski show that you can still tell an old-fashioned story without being a slave to tradition.” Music videos have helped break the linear monotony, he says, “but 99% of all films still tell stories like it was the 1940s.”

Manchevski has no intention of abandoning music videos and has an eclectic wish list that includes Pearl Jam, David Bowie and the Rolling Stones. “But a music video of Mozart’s Requiem--that would be the best.”