Discoveries from Kosovo World Cinema

After losing their livelihood in a village, a Kosovar family is forced to move to the capital in pursuit of a place in a hypercapitalist society.

North Washington county sheriff Tabby finds herself alone in the sheriff’s office one night while her colleagues are out on patrol, but she soon finds out they’ve been set up by a murderous drug cartel while she herself comes under siege at the office, where she must battle desperately to save herself and her son.

Lis, a 10-year-old boy, whose father is a missing person from the Kosovo war, lives cramped in a small apartment with his family during early 2000. Trying to forget a secret only he knows, Lis joins a French trio of clowns who are in Kosovo to entertain the children of the land. Soon enough Lis will learn that reality will catch up with everyone, and he will have to face his suppressed emotions.

Sixty years after the nuclear devastation, a few survivors cling to life in a ruined industrial zone. Ten-year-old Niko lives with his grandfather Lexi, convinced that their territory is a "paradise" worth defending. Lexi indoctrinates Niko to hate the rival survivors across the railroad tracks. A violent confrontation with a feral child triggers a brutal conflict in which the children serve the adults' power struggles. As the adults' violence escalates, Niko realizes that Lexi is not the man he thought he was. The arrival of Xeni's family reveals that borders are a prison, and escape threatens deadly consequences for the children.

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An actress joins an Art Therapy program at a Women's Rehabilitation Center in Kosovo, helping survivors turn their pain into art until their stories awaken her own suppressed wartime trauma and hidden identity.

Based on a true story, Agnus Dei is a kind of Oedipus of our days. Peter must find his way to redemption. But the past will make itself known and fate sparingly gives mercy. Can he save himself, or even be saved at all?

The friendship of two boys is tested to its limits as they battle for survival during the Kosovo war.

In rural Kosovo, identical houses are built for family members working abroad, in the hope that they will one day return to settle in their old homeland.

Albania, 1996. Mira lives in Elbasan with her two sons while her husband works illegally in Greece. Struggling to make ends meet, she invests in a pyramid scheme, hoping for a better future. When close friends migrate, mira grows desperate and sells their apartment to reinvest, moving in with her parents. But the scheme collapses, the country falls into chaos, and mira loses everything. Her teenage son toni becomes violent, eventually arming himself during a riot. Fearing for their safety, Mira decides to flee Albania with her sons. After a dangerous journey, they arrive in Thessaloniki—lost, without Arben, but finally together. At the luna park, they find a fleeting moment of peace.

As thousands of men, women and children attempt to get into Europe, a comfortable English family sets out on what appears to be a holiday.

Set in Kosovo in 1990 at a time of political volatility as Yugoslavia is breaking apart, ERA tells the story of 17-year-old Era, a rebellious Albanian girl who has fallen in love with Betim, a man stuck between two worlds on account of his having an Albanian father and a Serbian mother. Era is forced not to see him for a while until the situation calms.

Zoe and Volta, childhood friends from a remote village, move to Pristina to pursue their studies. Full of dreams and youthful idealism, they befriend a group of rebellious, anti-establishment activists determined to make their voices heard. Amidst the social and political tensions of Kosovo in 2007, on the brink of independence, they navigate a country in turmoil—one searching for its identity while its youth remain overlooked.

Fisnik is about to embark on a absurd journey in creating a fake weeding video, to get the German visa. He has to succeed in convincing his family, friends, and his ex to join him in this crazy journey.

Fresh out of the joint, a 47 year old man returns to his Bronx neighborhood and immediately becomes entangled in obsessive revenge whilst trying to court a local gal.

A 2006 Albanian language drama film directed by Burbuqe Berisha, starring Bislim Muçaj, Ylber Bardhi and Ramadan Malaj.

The year is 37 BC. A young Liburnian Volsus is taken by a Roman unit to help in what at first seems a simple task of collecting taxes, but the encounters with local Illyrian tribes soon lead to unexpected turns of events, as they show more resilience to subjugation than meets the eye. We see their archaic, emotional world of quaint and brutal laws and traditions through the eyes of this youngster, regarded by the Romans as a primitive barbarian, and gradually come to understand that their world is not all that different from our own.

Haunted by her long-suppressed past and pressured by family to seek treatment from mystical healers for her infertility, a Kosovar woman struggles to reconcile the expectations of motherhood with a legacy of wartime brutality.

Drin finds himself unchanged, aside from his experience, at the end of his existential crisis.

10-year-old Nori is obliged to grow up at a very young age after the early death of his mother and then being abandoned by his father Gezim in the Kosovo of the 1990s.After a dangerous and eventful journey, Nori finally arrives in Germany and is reunited with his father, but he cannot understand how Gezim could just have left him. And chances of them being able to stay in Germany look bleak when Gezim’s application for asylum is rejected.

Bekim and Anita are getting married, but Anita is unaware that Bekim is still in love with his best friend Nol. The Marriage charts the emotional predicament of the man who has strong feelings for two persons. There is great pressure to marry and only mild support for LGBTQ rights in Kosovan society, so Zeqiri’s film, which unashamedly puts same-sex and heterosexual passion on the same plane, is a forceful step in the right direction, as well as a dynamic portrait of romance and deception in the shadow of war.

In an indeterminate future, forbidden memories challenge a database containing all human memories. An experimental cinematic search between past and future, fiction and fact, Prishtina and Tirana. The future, a glitch.

A young man in his late teens uses his sway in the family to cover for his cousin.

A journey through childhood memories brings nostalgia full of pain and love. Nothing is as it was in childhood; only memories roam freely and illuminate in retrospect. The environment and everything of that time has been violently ruined and altered by someone. Seasons have settled in the ruins of troubled memories.

Genc gets into existential crisis, loses his will and purpose for his life, as he thinks that he is the cause of his roommate's death. As an escape from this reality, he uses the virtual (reality) world.

In today’s Tirana, Agim and Gëzim, two inseparable deaf-mute identical twin brothers, live under the same roof. Ana, Gëzim’s girlfriend, a young high-spirited woman in her thirties, visits them quite often. One evening, Agim is driving back home with Gëzim, when his sight gets blurred and a fatal accident nearly occurs. At the ophthalmologist, a few days later, the two brothers discover that due to a genetic and rare disease, they will separately, but progressively and irreversibly go blind. Slowly immersing into an unbearable silenced darkness, not being able to see the world and each other anymore, only Ana by their side, the two brothers have to make a strong decision around a cup of coffee with new shoes on.

After the disappearance of a young actress, a director is left alone with memories, guilt, and the silence she left behind. In an attempt to understand what happened, he confronts himself, the past, and an unknown figure who seems to have always been there. Chronicles of Sonatine or: Shadows of the Broken Memories is a story built on half-truths and the people who get lost within them. Can you restore a memory… without distorting it?

After years of exile, Remo, an orphan, returns to his childhood village in the Balkans. He must help his adoptive cousin, Una, with the exhumation of a mass grave that contains most of their family members buried there during the war. But the bodies reveal family secrets that will make Remo and Una question their past and their future. A film about the possibility of truth in a place that only knows survival.

In a peaceful neighborhood life is quiet, but a traumatic past promises to change lives of people that live there, forever.

Somewhere in Kosovo, in an isolated village, three young women find their dreams and ambitions stifled, but nothing can stop them in their quest for independence.

A woman who is raped and gives birth to a child in war torn Kosovo, struggles to keep her child.

Prishtina, Kosova, late 1990s. As war looms and ethnic tensions escalate, 13-year-old Dua struggles to find her place among her peers and within her changing body. After an incident shakes her community, she becomes a target herself and bonds with a fearless girl, Maki, who draws her toward an unexpected form of resistance. Between the daily violence and the growing threat of exile, there is little room for quiet awakenings.

A road documentary which is made up of filming in Macedonia, Kosovo, Serbia and Croatia. Both the originator and producer of the documentary, Ivana Kvesic has got in touch with the four directors from the countries, to follow one of the directors and their environment, by seeing the reflections of the city and its aura especially throughout the creative process. During this journey, through traces of the transformation experienced by those countries which previously used to make up a whole, we aim to underline the inter cultural similarities and problems with which younger generations in these regions experience.

As their city is occupied by a new organized crime boss, three local gangsters decide to return from Mexico and fight him in a mouse and cat game.

A pianist infected with HIV, falls in love with a young ballerina with whom he wants to have a serious relationship. They decide to spend the night together, but with the girl insisting to have non protected sexual relations the pianist has doubts about the right choice…

After a year of online pillow-talk, Ben, a shy Kosovar teen, is exhilarated to finally meet his first (but secret) love, Leo. Consumed with passion, Ben carefully weaves the plans and cover-story for his much desired romantic tryst with Leo who is arriving from Germany in just one month. Everything must be perfect. Great news, Ben’s mother surprises him and the family with a life changing opportunity, but he just can’t take it yet. He must meet Leo.

After Kosovo's independence the first internationally recognized sports federation was the one of Table Tennis. Two local Ping-Pong enthusiasts see this as a great opportunity and start self-financing the training sessions for young players.

A drama set in Kosovo, centered on a man's spiritual struggle between love and hate, vengeance and forgiveness. Personal tragedy brings Flamur back to his native Kosovo. There, in his homeland, he begins to wrestle with his memories, guilt, and instincts towards revenge- as well as the cyclical chain-reaction of violence and conflict he was brought up in.

Story happens in the first days after NATO troops enter Kosova. After the signing of the military agreement in Kumanovo, in the house of the retarded, the guards and employees leave their places and flee. Inmates are all retarded but they have a special philosophy of life, they have their wishes and their dreams. Being free gives them a chance to make dreams come true, but they are confronted with a reality and environment, which in one way or another is very different. From the moment of getting out the fences, they are conflicted with people that call themselves free. Gradually this conflict roughens and with it degenerates the meaning of freedom. There are three main characters, Kukum, Mara and Hasan.

The end of the shift finds nurse Ajkuna conversing with a colleague. He's acquired the information she was looking for: a link to an organ trafficking circle. As she goes through various encounters with strangers and acquaintances, and wrestles with her daughter’s impending graduation, Ajkuna begins to see herself imploding.

Assi, a failing actor, returns from army reserve duty to his hometown in Southern Israel. While he dreams of becoming a successful theater actor in Tel Aviv, he teaches high-school drama acting classes by day, and acts in a small cabaret show in the local community center by night. An unexpected event makes him famous - as the public enemy number one. His new reality would force him to decide if he should lay low and conform, or use his theatrical skills to speak up about the corruption of society - as he juggles through the grand circus that is his life.

To escape a marriage arranged by her extremely religious father, a young girl seizes the chance to run away and save more than herself.

A clash of two cultures, one primitive and the other exotic wild and cunning, but both of them with a violence and crime story, will face with each other in a house.

"The Actors of Cannes" is a documentary film project that showcases a painful part of Kosovo’s history – the spring 1990 school poising of 8400 students by the Serbian government. The mass poisoning of Albanian Kosovars targeted students, teachers, citizens, even young children in preschools.

A lonely boy, who lives in Amsterdam with his refugee mother from Kosovo, keeps getting into trouble while yearning for her acceptance. But the traumas caused by the war, which his mother hides away from him, turn his world upside down.

A reflective short film set in Prishtina follows a painter who grapples with a city rapidly losing its memory and identity after the war.

Sara and Shkurta are two young girls, whose cents end in similar situations. They meet accidentally on the street and decide to support each other. Sara is a student and she is in a love affair with a boy who is part of the fun club "Plisat". He decides to help Sara with money, but she does not want them and she decides to leave her life and also leaves the dormitory and decides to give birth to her baby. Here, in this situation Shkurta help Sara. Shkurta is an actress, where her boyfriend Drilon is also playing in one of her films. At one point he becomes very jealous during filming, and both lose their roles. She is out in the street, without money and without anything.

A soon-to-be-bride takes one last night to try something she's always wanted to in Paris, a passionate affair reaches its breaking point in the suburbs of America and two 'friends' finally have a long-postponed conversation about their previous romantic encounter. An anthology of short films from female filmmakers about lesbian and LGBTQIA+ relationships.

Trauma from the past and the lack of the family leads a child to strange activities-this triggers the curiosity of everyone, especially of the girl. The interest for fire and the weird boy – the emotional relation makes the girl become a victim of the phenomenon.

In the early '90s, the Yugoslavian Government cancelled the autonomy of Kosovo, dissolved its Parliament and closed down the National Television. All institutional life was reorganized by the new authorities, while the majority of the citizens responded with peaceful demonstrations. During this terrible time, Fadili, who works as an archivist, has to choose between two options, knowing that both of them are wrong. He therefore involuntarily and unwillingly "swallows" the shame, endures the pressure bearing down from all sides and puts up with the bad reputation for only one reason: to provide for his family.

Living in a crowded, multi-generational household in a small village in Kosovo, the quiet teenager Venera can rarely find privacy. However, when she befriends the rebellious Dorina, a new, liberating world opens up to her. Slowly, Venera begins to push against her conservative family’s expectations.

Berna, a young woman weighed down by unspoken trauma, moves through the neon-lit streets of Prishtina, haunted by a menacing spectre from her past. As she attempts to navigate her bleak existence, a series of violent encounters forces her to confront her deepest fears.

Recording a 24-hour period throughout every country in the world, we explore a greater diversity of perspectives than ever seen before on screen. We follow characters and events that evolve throughout the day, interspersed with expansive global montages that explore the progression of life from birth, to death, to birth again. In the end, despite unprecedented challenges and tragedies throughout the world, we are reminded that every day we are alive there is hope and a choice to see a better future together. Founded in 2008, it set out to explore our planet's identity and challenges in an attempt to answer the question: Who are we?

Four actors travel illegally through Balkan borders in war times to a theatre festival. But their real mission is to find their idol Michael Palin.

Little Genti wants a puppy. He expresses his wish at the family gathering, after his Roma coeval Xeni shows at the door, with his stray dog friend Aaj. This brings up a fired up discussion among the grown ups. After a quick disapproval, discussion changes its path into a clash of generations, conflict between traditional beliefs and new contemporary way of life. Ignored by grownups and despite his mother's disapproval, Genti joins Xeni and Aja on the street, continuing to find his new puppy-friend.

Twenty-five years after his abduction during the Kosovo War, painter Skender Muja recalls a pivotal moment of survival. Held in a detention center, he was ordered to draw a Serbian commander’s portrait to save his life.

Story of Azem Bejta (1889–1924), commonly known as Azem Galica, who was an Albanian nationalist and rebel who fought for the unification of Kosovo with Albania.

Blending archival footage, haunting melodies, and digital reconstructions, Hyjnesha në Fron traces the echo of loss across Kosovo's turbulent history. A musical, visual essay shaped by absence, which resurrects physical memory through 3D reconstruction, showing how history persists even when its material proof has vanished.

On October 14, 2014, the two Eastern European countries of Albania and Serbia faced off on the soccer field in the Serbian capital of Belgrade. With Albanian fans not permitted to attend the game due to purported safety concerns, the stadium full of Serbian fans echoed racist chants and death threats. Tensions rose to a boil when a drone carrying an Albanian flag flew above the players and onto the field. Angered fans rushed the field, attacking the Albanian players, forcing the match to end. A history of political tensions, war, and sport is explored as we follow the journey of the Albanian national team on their first appearance in a major tournament.

People exiled from their homes, deprived of money and valuables, sent to prisons – that is how they are treated during a war. A witness to these dramatic events is a German mark banknote with a portrait of Clara Schumann. Passed from hand to hand, it is part of the war, emigration or illegal business. This depressing plasticine animation shows a grim wartime reality. The leitmotif of the wandering banknote allows the story to come full circle and leads to a slightly hopeful ending.