Toni Naumovski is this year’s winner of the prestigious “Meto Jovanovski” award for high artistic achievement in the art of film for 2026, at the fifth anniversary edition of the Balkan and Mediterranean Film Festival “Across the Lake” in Dojran.
-Every recognition means, fulfills, motivates, obliges and is a privilege, especially when that recognition comes from home. Meto Jovanovski is a great master who played in the world champions’ league. Unfortunately, I never had the opportunity to collaborate with him, but I always enjoy, rejoice and admire his masterful acting achievements, says Naumovski.
Toni Naumovski is the only Macedonian actor, but also one of the few Balkans who have their own careers in theater, film and television in New York. What the actor experiences there, in the heavenly big city, cannot be told, it has to be experienced, survived and lived, every day, every second and every breath with which one breathes life and receives the spirit of freedom in order to do what one dreams of with open eyes. Or to act it out on film.
He did it in the first person singular in “My New York” where he plays himself, an emigrant and a lunatic. To be on stage, to stand in front of the camera and live the chance to be “Night Agent”, to be Marko, to be Victor in “Los Cos”, to reach “Endgame” as Ivan Aslanov, to be a wretch and a taxi driver in “Here Today”, to be Aleksandar Leko and serve “Madam Minister” but also Einstein in “Honeymoon”, to believe more than Oleg that “Orange is the New Black”, in the meantime to box and tell his family at home that life is “Not an American movie”, to be a soldier who is dying of life and is looking for a cure “In therapy”, to be beautiful, but also to be with a scar on his face, to be in reality, to return to the past, to fly to the future and ride in the world of fairy tales. These are his lives. Don’t be careful when you live! According to the life of Toni Naumovski, some lives can be lived.
How to read the list of the life of the actor Toni Naumovski played in more than eighty characters, in the same number of film and television productions, in more than a dozen languages, including several productions in Macedonia, his father’s homeland which he will discover and recognize with each of his returns in search of the spirit of freedom which, at least that thing, the spirit in Toni Naumovski is in limitless quantities. That magic that Toni Naumovski in the character of Vladimir will bring with him in his, but also in the story of Lena in the Macedonian film “Lena and Vladimir” last year alone will bring him fourteen awards and the same number of nominations for acting achievement in the art of film at more than eighty festivals in Europe and America.
Toni Naumovski is an actor who is an example of desire, dedication and endless love for the art of film, an actor with the same wild force and tame passion for the triangle of the world in which he is a circle in the rectangular frame of the film in which Meto Jovanovski also stood. Toni Naumovski is an actor who plays with filigree accuracy and restraint a storyteller and a seller of hair growth lotions. In the same story and in one character that only once again, and in the case of the man Toni Naumovski confirms that what in art we need to give to others, in the profession of acting – can only be taken from ourselves.
Toni Naumovski is an artist who has education and knowledge about life and art, not only about film, even more than an actor who knows where he wants to go. But Toni Naumovski is an actor who does not want to know where what he wants begins and where it ends – on the contrary what he has. Toni Naumovski is an artist, but also a craftsman with a perfect speech technique, with the athletic body of a snake in a lion’s skin and with the gaze of a child who every day searches for the way from school to home, because acting in the art of film is a journey that has only one goal – to continue around the next corner, behind the next meeting with oneself, in the role of someone else, in search of the way home.
Toni Naumovski is an actor who in the art of film is the beginning and the end of the journey that we want to never end. Toni Naumovski is an actor who tells and to whom we tell, before and after the story that dreams come true. We thank him endlessly for all these dreams and for all the paths of all actors in the world of the art of film. Welcome home. Welcome to the world of lovers of images that move across the seas and across the lake.
