‘We can actually improve ourselves by meditating, by connecting to nature and the surroundings.’

De Masedoanyske skriuwster en filmmakster Marija Makeska is sûnt 15 septimber yn Fryslân. Sy sil yn it ramt fan it projekt Other Words / Oare Wurden acht wike yn Ljouwert ferbliuwe en dêr ûnder oare wurkje oan it skript fan har nije film: 2027: The Time of the Crystal Children. Marija (1986) is berne yn Skopje. Tusken 2003 en 2015 wenne se yn Detroit (FS) en dêrnei gong se werom nei Skopje. Se skriuwt poëzij en toaniel. Yn 2014 ferskynde har dichtbondel The book of muses. Yn 2008 wûn se de Office of the Provost Grant foar in dokumintêre oer de Masedoanyske Joaden yn de Twadde Wrâldoarloch. Dy film waard fertoand op ferskate festivals, ûnder oare yn de FS, Kanada, Eastenryk, Servië en Masedoanië. Har jongste film is Dear Alexandr (2015).

Can you tell something about the filmscript you’re writing, 2027: The Time of the Crystal Children?
Marija: ‘Well, I will tell you only something briefly, because as filmmakers we’re not supposed to give out the plot before the film is finished. It’s an idea that I got from the science-fiction films, because they are a little too negative. The talk about hopeless things in the world, that the world’s going to end, we have to seek out new planets to colonize… That is really the Hollywood message. I said to myself, because of my spiritual background and what I’ve been taught in spirituality: we have a beautiful planet and it is our job to save it, not to destroy it. It can actually be done with global consciousness. The number of children that are born with natural abilities is skyrocketing in the last several years – autistic savants, children with telepathy, psychokinesis, children who understand energy, star children, indigo children… some speak about new thinking and development in science, others say they came from other planets, some draw and paint better than famous artists, some are very spiritual and become spiritual teachers. All these children, if they actually take the right path, can actually improve the world. Many of these children are actually drugged in order to be kept on the level of understanding of human consciousness that is right now. But actually that’s not the right thing to do. We have to step forward and say: these children can do something beyond our understanding, but you need to ask them: what can you do for me, how can you improve the world? And that’s not being done yet. But I hope that things are going to change. That there will be children out there and that they’re going to start changing things around. That’s how the whole idea of the movie came. That’s why it’s called 2027: The Time of the Crystal Children. Major global changes are already happening in society, but they will start getting much visible from next year and they are going to escalate and culmunate in 2027. According to my spiritual teacher, Nikola Tesla in Serbia, there will be major changes in everything around us – our society, how we actually do trading and banking, and in consciousness. These crystal children are actually going to be the leaders after 2027. So, the movie will be a positive message to people, because if we don’t heal our own planet first, we will ruin all others that we colonize. Think about that.’

What else are you going to work on during your stay in Fryslân?
‘I’m already working on themes for short documentaries. I don’t know all the themes. I went to Harlingen yesterday and I saw that it has a beautiful history and that a lot of artists and crafters come from there. I was so amazed, and not just from the canals and the open air museum, but also the spirit of the city is very uplifting. That’s going to be one of my first themes and hopefully we will receive a good weather next week. A second theme I’m going to do is Leeuwarden’s history. And a third theme is going to be about Frisian language and literature. So those are the three things I will do. I don’t know about other themes, but I’m going to focus on the things I am doing right now, maybe I can decide something more later.

I’m also going to write a short story, not too short, because I never write short stories of five pages, but maybe a twenty or thirty pages story, about a Frisian who marries somebody from the US. Something major happens in her life, she loses her Frisian husband and I can’t tell you how, because that’s the whole twist. She stays here in the Netherlands and something major happens again, another twist. She actually starts seeking the answers to it. It’s not going to happen entirely in Frisia, but most of it, about 80 percent.’

What are your other plans for the coming weeks?
‘I have a schedule. Tomorrow I’m going to a lecture at Tresoar, an introduction about Frisian literature by Teake Oppewal. Bert Looper of Tresoar is then going to give me the camera. On the 25th of September there’s a museum concert with the Kwartet Batik at the Frisian Museum. Then we have the Grutte Pier open air play from the 26th to the 1st of October at Kimswert. On the 29th there will be the Big Leeuwarder Dinner at the Tweebaksmarkt. On the 7th of October is the Day of the Frisian Literature at the Frisian Academy. On 4th of November we have the Obe Postma award giving for Frisian translation. And then from the 9th to the 13th of November is the Northern Filmfestival. But I also saw some cool things on the 23th for example, some Frisian folk music concerts. I might go to that event and ask if I can film. That would be a good idea to film as a part of the Leeuwarden documentary. I’ve seen some very interesting documentaries on the Czech Television that really inspired me, because they’re all about places and their shooting style is so simple, but they are very informational.’

You and André Looijenga met when he stayed in Bitola, Macedonia, for the Other Words project. Where did you go together?
‘I was going to Bitola quite frequently because of André and other things. I wanted to help out, so it was actually my open will to do so. That’s how I decided to meet with him and to help him out around, also with Alek, the president of Forum na Mladi organisation. I showed him around Skopje mostly because that’s my city. I accompanied him to a couple of events in Bitola. He was also received very well in my house. We had coffee, we went to the mountains, we had lunch at my house as well. When he had an interview on a radio show, I received him at home because the noise of traffic was just very loud outside and he couldn’t do it anywhere else. We went to the museums, we went to the bazar,we went to the square… He visited every institution that was important in Skopje… and I gave him some contacts of friends. So, after that, he was able to go to Štip, because he was invited there by the contacts I gave him. He went to some other places by himself. So, his stay in Macedonia was pretty adventurous. André will now be my guide here. He helped me with some things in the past couple of days. Now I can do some things myself without help, but anyways he will still be here.’

On the site behance.net/marijamakeska I saw that you made many movies. When did you start filmmaking?
‘I went to film and theatre school in Wayne State University in Detroit, Michigan after two years of high school there. My first film Soul Mates got a grant in 2008 by the Office of the Provost Grant of Wayne State University. It was a subject that wasn’t talked about before in Macedonia, but according to my grandmother, there was a large Jewish community before WWII. I actually had no idea that Macedonia had Jewish people. But, she was helping them with food when she was only twelve years old. On the cold winter morning of March 11, 1943, the Nazis took all the Jews that they were able to capture from Bitola, Štip and Skopje and put them in a temporary camp in the Monopoly, which is a place with several buildings, close to my house in Skopje, and it was a tobacco factory since the 1920s. After a few days they were transported to Treblinka where they were actually all finished. She told me that she was giving bread and cucumbers to the Jews and that she was trying to find her friend. So I don’t know what really happened, but I don’t think her friend survived. The film was screened at five countries, it was pretty successful for a first film. I got the idea when I was in America and I filmed in Macedonia.’

Are you still writing for the theatre?
‘The theatre was something that I always loved doing but there was no way of making money with it. Detroit especially is pretty depressing and I don’t like to say that, but things are going down there in the arts and people are struggling more and more. They don’t want to say that, but it’s true. In America more people are buried in their cell phones now, and there is less support for the arts, because only seniors support it. I know only a few people who stayed to do theatre in Detroit, but most of them leave and go to L.A, New York, or Las Vegas. Anyways, in film I may not make a lot of money, but I could still make something. That’s how I decided to take the film degree as well. I used to write theatre plays, but I don’t anymore, because I don’t have enough connections to theatre people. I’ve been doing film more and I am fairly busy with that. That doesn’t mean I can’t go back and do things for the theatre. In fact, I would always love to go back, it’s the father of all arts!’

What plays did you write in the past?
‘Short plays, all were written in college. I had one performed, it was a comedy called Valentine… it is about two roommates. One actually reveals that she’s waiting for this guy Valentine and the other one reveals that she had some fun with Valentine. Then the girlfriend comes looking for him with a broom, trying to beat the other two. But there is a twist… he leaves his girlfriend with a fourth one… I guess his name means something… like Cassanova.’

Is there a central theme in your movies?
‘The subjects are always different and they started changing from a couple of years ago, because of my spiritual awakening. The stories that I write are a lot about children. They are not necessarily in every story, but in a lot of them. They are not supposed to be horror stories or anything to do with violence. I do global and universal themes, not necessarily just cultural themes. I’ve made movies in Macedonian and in English up until this point, but I’m open to more languages.’

What can you tell me about your last movie, Dear Alexandr?
‘Dear Alexandr was a dream I had. It met a person that I simply became drawn into, like I knew him from before, and I saw him in a dream being in the middle of nothing. There was a castle and an open endless place of sand and nothing else in the distance, and he was sitting on a mattress. It was technically about somebody else who he met and fell in love with and she didn’t come to meet him at the place where he was now. That was the dream. I felt that he was a certain karma to me. I started writing and I started passionately expressing myself, because I’ve always loved music, dreams and I always wanted to find somebody out there who supports me in a spiritual way, but I didn’t have that one at the time. So, I combined all that in an artistic way and that’s how I made the film. The film was shown at the Manaki Brothers Film Festival in Macedonia, at Cinedays in Macedonia, in Malta, Norway, Australia, Scotland and it may be, and it will also be shown in October at a film festival in Miami, Florida.’

Besjoch de trailer fan de film Dear Alexandr: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r2sb3hEZ3eA.

Please tell me more about your spiritual background.
‘That’s a very big story for a book, but the time hasn’t come for it yet, because of our shallow human conscioussness! But things are going to change. I will be short for now. In 2013 I met somebody that I felt a very strong spiritual connection with. His name is Nikola Tesla. I interviewed him for the Spread magazine, and I was a volunteer journalist at the time. It was about a film that was being made about him, and I came across it while searching on the Internet about Tesla movies. The film is up until this point still not finished, but that’s not important. The important part of this is that he started teaching me about the universal spiritual connection of everything. I’ve always loved astronomy, astrology and the cosmos, but it was all just book theories, some factual information about the physical world, and opinions, that get us nowhere beyond searching for things in the sky.

I loved also Albert Einstein, Nikola Tesla, Gallileo Gallilei, all the scientists. I had a telescope when I was twelve. My dad brought it from America to me and it was like a huge happiness. So my entire room was filled with planets and nebulas. I didn’t know that there was actually a spiritual connection to the whole universe, and instead of seeking it out in that physical world, we should seek it in ourselves. We are the universe ourselves! So, Tesla became my spiritual teacher with my conscious choice, and started teaching me how we can actually improve ourselves by meditating, by our connecting to nature and the surroundings. And I always had a strange connection and love for nature. I never hated cities, but I just loved to be in nature more. So it just added things up. He was telling me about consciousness and how I can explore it outside of what I know, without actually being there physically, but I could sense and understand that his goal was to allow me to explore myself, and find out who I am. So I explored my dreams, I started actually seeing Nikola Tesla in my dreams. Everything was happening suddenly for a reason. So, I started meditating a lot and I started writing about my meditations and karma.

I started exploring a lot of my past life and I found a lot of things about myself and that everything connects with everything. I understood that we are actually energy and not just bodies. We are all one, we can be given names, and we can give things, animals and plants names, but even names are energy. So there is not an actual identity to anything. We humans are 70% water in the and 30% something else in our physical bodies, but what we are also made of atoms that are 1 % matter in the physical world and 99% energy, coming from other dimensions. We are interdimensional! It’s our free will to choose when we want to find that out and how. It all starts with activating our chakras, and especially our higher ones, to communicate with the spiritual world by meditation. I found out through meditating that not all people, but many were made in special laboratories in South Africa and Romania (there are also archealogical facts, books and tours with guides you can do if you are interested to find out about the hidden history of humanity). They didn’t come from the monkeys like we tend to think, but from different DNAs in order to be what we are today. And we’re actually programmed to do certain things that we’re not aware of, such as birth, physical life, hatred, jealousy, discrimination, one of the biggest ones is fear, physical death… If we kill those programs, we can actually live forever. And that’s what my spiritual teacher is doing right now. He is now killing off those programs by meditating and by doing special exercises. He’s very close to killing them! I exercise every day to do the same, and it is called the Tesla School for Rejuvination. And then there is the Tesla School for Longevity and then for Eternal Youth. So when you get to the Eternal Youth, it’s when you start killing those programs for real. It’s very good for your health, it’s something universal, it doesn’t have anything to do with a religion or a cult. It is something that you do for yourself, with your own ambition and free will.’

But, is Nikola Tesla the real name of your spiritual teacher? Tell me something about him.
‘Yes, that is his actual name. Nikola Tesla. I previously talked that names are energy. It’s not really about what your parents want to call you, but about the feeling of who you are (didn’t we talk about the crystal children whose voice is completely silenced?). So, whatever his name was on the papers when he was born is not important. He’s been a real wonder to his family since his birth. He was running away in the forest because he couldn’t stand his family rumoring about others. He was always trying to have them understand who he is. When he was getting together with people in their eighties and ninetees, he would teach them something, and they would tell his family that he was a special child, that he could teach the elderly more than what they could teach him. He was born in a family of healers, truthsayers, botanists, crystalotherapists, people who could see the future. It was a gift passed from a greatgrandmother, to his grandmother, to his mother, to him, and now to his younger niece (she’s also a crystal child). He always talks about nature, improving the world with improving ourselves first spiritually – and when that happens, we will understand the fruits of all Tesla inventions. He says that we, as beings, are infinite and eternal. Our souls are eternal, but we can make our bodies eternal, too, with our choice of free will and ambitious exercising. People can believe it or not, but my spiritual teacher Nikola Tesla is a reincarnation of the scientist Nikola Tesla. A lot of people will laugh, be skeptics, say it’s not possible, but their minds are shallow. They either can’t think yet beyond of what is being served to them by the media and they may spiritually awake in the future, or they can’t think at all. It’s not my problem. It’s theirs.’

You are also a poet. Your poetry book The Book of Muses appeared in 2014.
‘Yes. The book is divided in three chapters. The first chapter is my most recent poetry. It’s about my personal spiritual meetings with a goddess. I started doing some ancient cults in 2009 and then in my dreams it just happened, I started meeting her. I wasn’t really aware at first, but it actually started to mean something. I did all the rituals to bless this goddess, but when I met Tesla I stopped, because I understood that there is a lot more than just believing in Gods. The second chapter of the book is about Macedonia. And the third chapter is gothic poetry. It was just a part of my life when I had a little bit of romantic crisis and I started writing things that inspired me, like German gothic culture. It was darkish so to speak, but that was just a period of my life. I completely stopped writing poetry when I met Tesla, because I found what I was looking for. I understood that some people in the gothic world are depressed and lost, and they are seeing something out there, but they don’t know what it is yet. But I know what it is. Spiritual enlightement, light, love, happiness, it’s completely the opposite of what they think they should do.’

Did you experience violence during war in Bosnia after the split of Yugoslavia, and war in 2001 in your country?
‘Well, those are completely two different wars, but I wasn’t much aware of the war in Bosnia because I was a child. However, Macedonia received a lot of Bosnian refugees. Many Bosnians stayed after the war. About the war in Macedonia in 2001 – we didn’t have anything in our area, but it was bad in Tetovo, in the village of Arachinovo, and in some villages closer to Kumanovo. The rebels were trying to get closer to Skopje and they got as far as one suburb, but they were quickly responded by the army and they couldn’t go further.’

What is the position of the Macedonian language and literature in your country?
‘We have a Macedonian language and we do have Macedonian literature. We have some medieval literature as well from Biblical texts, but it’s very small. From the 19th century we have collected folk stories, poems and folk songs. Because Macedonia was under the Ottoman empire for a long time, Macedonians and all christians were counted as second hand citizens and they didn’t have schools and books to learn from. The official state language was Turkish then, but all languages within the Turkish Empire were allowed to be spoken and passed on. That was a good thing, and that’s why the Balkan languages survived. In the Balkan wars the Ottoman Emperor along with the Ottoman government and armies were kicked out, and many other Turks left. In communist era a lot of Turks got kicked off of Yugoslavia and got settled in Turkey. In Yugoslavia, Macedonian then became the main language in Macedonia, and was promoted widely by the literature and grammar pioneers at the time, and it fourished within a few years. There was a requirement in school for everyone to in Yugoslavia to have Serbo-Croatian, and maybe Russian, or German and French. English wasn’t spoken by that generation, only a few knew it, and it was an elective. They are now in their fifties and older, and they are hardly used to speaking English. On the other hand, people in their early fourties and younger were college students in 1991 and after, when taking private English lessons became a huge trend. But, in general, Macedonian wasn’t a surpressed language by the Yugoslavian government. It was just a requirement to know Serbo-Croatian. Kind of like in Frisia. You speak Dutch, but you are not supressed if you want to speak Frisian.’

Is Macedonian also spoken in the Greek province of Macedonia?
‘No, because they don’t allow it. It’s a huge province. A lot of Macedonian people in Macedonia, Canada, Europe and America have land and houses there. Greeks are afraid that people will come back and start claiming the land and that it’s going to be to their disadvantage, but I don’t feel that it’s going to happen. Macedonians don’t want conflicts and wars. They want peace with everybody. Instead of being involved in politics, Macedonians have a folk festival every year in Aegean Macedonia (Greece) in a village called Ovcharani, and the Aegean Macedonians gather every year to dance and sing in Macedonian. The paying prize is that you get a whole bunch of Greek authorities watching from everywhere. Well, it’s not really a big problem to sing and to dance, but the energy of someone surveiling you is very uncormfortable. And, those who have tried to film and do interviews, especially journalists, can get themselves detained, jailed, or kicked off from Greece. So, the younger generation coming from Macedonian families don’t speak Macedonian. I have a friend whose mother side of the family lives in Thessaloniki. She says they don’t know any Macedonian words. People speak Greek and English there.’

Which film directors and writers are you inspired by?
‘I love Ingmar Bergman a lot. Bergman is my favourite one, I think. Andrey Tarkovsky, Sergei Parajanov, Aleksandar Sokurov, and the American film director Terence Malik. I like the old writers. Balzac primarely. When I was younger my mum was a librarian and I could read any book I wanted, and I read a lot of the Arthur Clarke books because of my interest in science fiction. I like the Macedonian drama a lot because it tends to have some great messages, but the literature is boring. I just don’t like to read about the exploration of today’s society by the young Macedonian writers and I don’t like to read about the past. I like the future more, and I look forward to contributing to literature in such ways.’

What is your impression of Fryslân and the Frisian people so far?
‘My first impressions were awesome. I think I can laugh about a lot of the jokes people make, even though I don’t speak the language. I can understand them. I love your hospitality. It’s minimalistic but I love the way it is. I love Leeuwarden, it is a beautiful city. Harlingen is even more beautiful. I like the villages a lot. It’s a little bit too flat for me, there are no mountains, but everything is good. I feel like a great guest in Frisia.’