Feuding gunslinger brothers Elijah (Joseph Fiennes) and Luke (David Wenham) are the focus of Macedonian director Milcho Manchevski's DUST. The brothers have a Cain-and-Abel relationship that finally comes to a head when Bible-quoting Elijah marries a French prostitute with whom Luke has an affair. Luke tries to escape his brother, and his guilty conscience, by fleeing as a mercenary to Macedonia, where his personal quest for internal peace gets tangled up by the local struggle against the Turks of the Ottoman Empire.

Manchevski tells the wild-west (by way of Macedonia) story of Elijah and Luke entirely in flashback, as elderly Lilith (Anne Brochet) recounts her family story to Edge (Adrian Lester), whom she has caught burglarizing her 21st-century New York City apartment. Cutting back and forth between the two time periods, Manchevski uses hallucinatory visuals and surreal images to both put the audience into the unraveling perspective of guilt-ridden Luke and approximate the fluctuating qualities of an old woman's memories.