Ron Holloway, Berlin, 15 August 2006
Five years ago, in the summer of 2001, a visionary team headed by Veton Nurkollari founded Dokufest Prizren, located in Kosovo’s second largest city, with a single purpose in mind that applies up to the present day: “It is our pleasure to bring back to people the sense of the cinema and to some of them the feeling of experiencing it for the first time. Today it’s hard to imagine a city with over 100,000 inhabitants which does not have a cinema in function.” At that time, thanks to modest funding by the Soros “Open Society” Foundation, Dokufest was launched on the premise that a film festival would help considerably to relieve the misery of the frightful Kosovo war. That tragic inter-ethnic conflict between Christian Serbs and Moslem Albanians was finally brought to a standstill only two years before, in June of 1999, after 78 days of continual NATO aerial bombardment of Yugoslav forces and Serbian police units across the length and breadth of Kosovo. Subsequently, tens of thousands of Serbs left the country – today around 30,000 remain from a previous population of circa 200,000 in the autonomous province still under Serb jurisdiction that once recorded an overall population of more than two million.
Seven years later, Serbs and Albanians are unwilling to resolve the ethnic and religious issues that tie both peoples to the past. Since the 8th century, Kosovo had been populated by a mixture of Albanians and Slavs. In the later Middle Ages, Kosovo lay at the heart of the Serbian empire under the Nemanjic dynasty. Between the mid-12th and the mid-14th century, the region was bequeathed an array of splendid Christian Orthodox monuments (e.g., the magnificent Gracanica monastery near Pristina with its 14th-century frescoes). Following the Ottoman victory at the Battle of Kosovo in 1389, however, the major portion of Kosovo’s Christian Serb population emigrated, while many others converted to Islam. By the middle of the 15th century, the Turks had expanded their conquests beyond Kosovo to rule over all of Serbia. Ethnic Albanians then identified with the region as well – so much so that, by the late 19th century, Prizren had become an important center of Albanian culture and national consciousness. This, in addition to some 6000 Turkish-speaking citizens residing in Prizren today.
Together with a dedicated festival team who gladly share responsibilities – among them, director Aliriza Arënliu, codirector Samir Karahoda, and coordinator Eroll Shporta – Veton Nurkollari has shaped Dokufest Prizren into one of the key documentary and short film festivals in the Balkans, thanks primarily to the efficacy of running a festival solely with videos and DVDs. Isa Qosja – Kosovo’s veteran director, whose political parable Kukumi (Kukum) (Kosovo, 2005) was one of the hits in the Regional Competition at last year’s Sarajevo Film Festival – serves as honorary festival president. “Prizren’s dreamers have made its dreams reality precisely by establishing Prizren’s Dokufest,” enthused Isa Qosja in his preface to this year’s festival catalogue. “All this has happened precisely thanks to the commitment of a few filmmakers from Prizren, who gave their dreams to this festival.” Indeed, the charm of Prizren is threefold, for it supports not only a Dokufest, but also Doku Photo – an annual exhibition of Magnum photographs – and Doku City, a lively bar-cafe setting ready-made for nonstop dialogue.
Several other factors work to the festival’s advantage. First, and most important of all, Prizren has a bohemian atmosphere, considered by its natives to be much more relaxed than the staid cultural life in the nearby capital city of Pristina – indeed, the festival regularly draws an audience of cineastes, intellectuals, and university students from the capital some 70 kilometers away. The competition films are programmed in two outdoor venues, the Kinos Lumbardhi (“White River”) and Nënkalaja (“Under the Fortress”), while during the day (or when it rains) crowds gather at the indoor “Shtëpiaq e Kulturës” Cultural House. The annual Doku Photo exhibition is housed in the attractive ruins of the Hamam (“Turkish Bath”) Gallery. A dozen volunteers gather each morning at Doku City to show guests around the town. The local German KFOR division – one of 14 administrative districts supervising circa 45,000 international troops under NATO command – helps out by providing electricity with powerful portable generators. Three juries – International Documentary Competition, Balkan Documentary Competition, Shorts and Animation Competition – award a dozen prizes and citations. Dokufest 2006 could boast of 30 sponsors and partners, among them Germany’s Auswärtiges Amt (Foreign Office) and ProCredit Bank. The Kosovo Cultural Ministry recently announced the establishment of a new Kosovo Film Office to help regulate the funding of productions and coproductions by Kosovo filmmakers. The snag in the overall picture? After seven long years, the country’s warring politicians are still waiting for the powers-that-be to decide on Kosovo independence. Unfortunately, it should be noted, for resident Kosovars and Serbs there is still no light visible at the end of the tunnel.
The Fifth Prizren Dokufest (8-11 August 2006), primed with a budget of Euro 60,000, programmed 94 documentaries and short films, including animation. It opened with a gala presentation of Dziga Vertov’s silent classic The Man with a Movie Camera (USSR, 1929) to live musical accompaniment by Sheffield-based “In the Nursery” with twins Klive and Nigel Humberstone on a console. A retrospective of three Werner Herzog documentaries – Little Dieter Needs to Fly (Germany/UK, 1997), The White Diamond (Germany, 2004), and The Wild Blue Yonder (Germany/UK/France, 2005) – drew overflow crowds. French film theorist Jean-Pierre Rehm, who also heads the documentary festival in Marseilles, conducted a three-day workshop in the Hamam Gallery. The Dokufest welcomed 70 guests from abroad, in addition to as many Kosovo filmmakers and film professionals on opening and closing nights. Representatives from the OSCE Mission in Kosovo were on hand for open-ended discussions and sponsored a Human Rights and Respect for Diversity Award. An afternoon excursion brought guests to a trout farm for an outdoor banquet on the border to Albania.
The International Jury, headed by Jean-Pierre Rehm, split the Grand Prize for Feature Documentary between Christian Frei’s The Great Buddhas (Switzerland) and Maasja Ooms and Aliona van der Horst’s Voices of Bam (Netherlands). The Great Buddhas chronicles with hidden cameras the destruction of the great Buddha in Afghanistan, a statue hewn into the face of a cliff in the Bamiyan valley more than 1500 years ago. Since initial attempts by inexperienced Taliban religious fanatics to dynamite the statue failed completely, this act of cultural barbarism had to be finished by more experienced Saudi and Pakistani engineers. Today, Swiss scientists are exploring ways to reconstruct this World Cultural Heritage. Voices of Bam pieces together, via from photos and snapshots found in the rubble, the shattered lives of some of the 43,000 victims killed in the earthquake on 26 December 2003 in the ancient Iranian city of Bam. The testimony of grieving survivors adds an emotional depth to the film that few documentaries of this nature possess. A Special Mention was given to David Kinsella’s Love Letters from a Children’s Prison (Norway). This hard-hitting documentary by a British filmmaker living in Norway explores the social ills in Russia that lead to murder, rape, and armed robbery by thousands of teenagers, youths who now languish behind prison bars and seek a way out by writing love letters to girlfriends.
Awarded Best Short Documentary, Astrid Bussink’s The Angelmakers (Netherlands/Hungary/UK) appears to be the documented side of Gyorgy Palfi’s feature Hukkle (Hiccups) (Hungary, 2003), an amusing tale of mysterious deaths in a quaint Hungarian town far off the beaten path. In Astrid Bussink’s half-hour sketch we visit the rural Hungarian village of Nagyrev, where memories are resurrected to arsenic murders committed in 1929 by women who wanted to get rid of their husbands. A Special Mention was deservedly given to Xavier Lukomski’s Une pont sur la Drina (A Bridge over the Drina) (Belgium/France). At first glance The Bridge over the Drina appears to be little more than a one-shot static view of a bridge over the River Drina near the Hercegovina village of Visegrad as it emerges from the darkness of night into the light of day. But then a factual witness at Den Haag pinpoints in chilling terms the death-toll of bodies (men, women, children) that passed nightly under this historic bridge once celebrated in a novel by Nobel Prize winner for literature Ivo Andric.
Awarded Best Short Film, Ashvin Kumar’s The Little Terrorist (India) comes across as a quaint tolerance tale of a 12-year-old Pakistani Moslem who carelessly crosses a no man’s land between Pakistan and India to retrieve a cricket ball, only to become a hunted illegal by Indian border guards. A kindly Indian family save the boy’s neck by shaving his head to look like a Brahmin. Even stronger as a political moral tale was Luiso Berdejo and Jorge C. Dorado’s La guerra (The War) (Spain), cited with a Special Mention. When a young girl witnesses the murder of her parents, she hides her baby brother in a wardrobe and then suffers a fatal injury herself that may leave both of them tragic victims of a senseless war. Another Special Mention went to Roman Filippov’s Posvyashenie (Initiation) (Russia). A poetic short feature shot in black-and-white, Initiation sketches the determination of a sensitive young boy to escape his tormentors on a playground while on his way to a flute rehearsal. Unfortunately overlooked for a citation was Filip Marczewski’s Melodramat (Melodrama) (Poland). A brilliant student film by a promising directorial talent, Melodrama scores as a compelling tale of love, longing, and pain as portrayed in the feelings of a sensitive 14-year-old boy in an urban slum towards his older sister, a young girlfriend, and the neighborhood toughs. The award for Best Animated Film went to Marie-Josée Saint-Pierre’s McLaren’s Negatives (Canada), a personal homage and captivating essay on the creative vision of the legendary Norman McLaren at the National Film Board of Canada.
Among the eleven films contending for Best Balkan Documentary were entries from Kosovo, Albania, Serbia, Bosnia-Hercegovina, Bulgaria, Romania, Turkey, and Croatia. The jury, headed by Germany’s Christine Kopf of the GoEast Festival in Wiesbaden, awarded Laurentiu Calciu’s Mamaliga te asteapta (The Land Is Waiting) (Romania), a feature documentary about a poor family working a farm in the northeastern corner of Romania near the city of Iasi. The focus is on a young man who gives up his studies at a theological seminary in Iasi to help his family work the land, while studying on the side to eventually pass an examination to reenter the school. A Special Mention was given to Iris Elezi’s impressive short documentary Heronjtë për një përdorim (Disposable Heroes) (Kosovo), a poignant report on the forgotten “heroes” of the recent Balkan war, who had sacrificed their limbs to defend their country and now are mostly forgotten by Kosovo government welfare officials. Another Special Mention went to Basak Demir’s short documentary Crying Skin (Turkey/Germany), a sketch of Kurdish women in Turkey living near the Syrian border who foster a dying tradition of skin tattoos with meaningful symbols.
Balkan documentaries in all the sections formed the backbone of the Prizren Dokufest. One that was particularly close to home was Srdjan Keca’s After the War (Serbia). a 47-minute documentary produced at Atelier Varan Belgrade. Shot in southern Kosovo in the mountains above Prizren, the documentary took months to complete and was completed only after repeated visits had been made to mountain villagers to win their confidence. In an isolated corner of Kosovo live an Islamic minority of Slavic origin, the Gorani, a people without a country of their own. What had kept them together and protected them for centuries was their homeland, the Gora mountains of southern Kosovo, located today along the borders to Serbia, Macedonia, and Albania. Unfortunately for the Gorani, Muslim in religion, they chose to fight mostly on the side of the Serbs in order to avert an onslaught by Serb police units. Today, surrounded by the Albanian majority, the Gorani are faced with the alternative of emigration – or reintegration, provided those dark memories of the Kosovo War can be forgotten. To Srdjan Keca’s credit, he documents the uncertainty of a people’s predicament without taking sides.
Along these same lines were two other award winners. Adela Peeva’s feature documentary Whose Is This Song? (Bulgaria), which has been making the rounds of Balkan festivals for the past three years, was awarded the Human Rights Award for Cultural Diversity. The charm of a popular love song that is sung at celebrations across the Balkans from Turkey to Serbia becomes a bone of fierce argumentative contention when Adela Peeva asks “experts” on a tour from Turkey, Greece, Macedonia, Albania, Bosnia, Serbia, and Bulgaria as to the source of the song loved and shared by all these peoples. A tragicomedy, to be sure, save that nationalistic feelings can explode into violent head-knocking if pushed too far.
The Audience Prize was also awarded to Nedzad Begovic’s Sasvim licno (Totally Personal) (Bosnia & Hercegovina), a feature documentary that takes the pulse of old Yugoslavia. Covering an autobiographical period of nearly 50 years, the Oscar-nominated Totally Personal begins in 1958, when the Bosnian filmmaker began his life under Tito, and continues on up to 2003, when he notes that present-day Bosnia is still wrestling with its destiny in a Balkan landscape that continually undergoes change. By the same token, one can say that Dokufest 2006 also takes the pulse of Kosovars who are still waiting patiently for their political destiny to be decided.
Awards
Best Feature Documentary – ex aequo
The Great Buddhas (Switzerland), dir Christian Frei
Voices of Bam (Netherlands), dir Maasja Ooms, Aliona van der Horst
Special Mention
Love Letters from a Children’s Prison (Norway), dir David Kinsella
Best Short Documentary
The Angelmakers (Netherlands/Hungary/UK), dir Astrid Bussink
Special Mention
Une pont sur la Drina (A Bridge over the Drina) (Belgium/France), dir Xavier Lukomski
Best Balkan Documentary
Mamaliga te asteapta (The Land Is Waiting) (Romania), dir Laurentiu Calciu
Special Mentions
Heronjtë për një përdorim (Disposable Heroes) (Kosovo), dir Iris Elezi
Crying Skin (Turkey/Germany), dir Basak Demir
Best Short Film
The Little Terrorist (India), dir Ashvin Kumar
Special Mentions
La guerra (The War) (Spain), dir Luiso Berdejo, Jorge C. Dorado
Posvyashenie (Initiation) (Russia), Roman Filippov
Best Animated Film
McLaren’s Negatives (Canada), dir Marie-Josée Saint-Pierre
Human Rights Award for Cultural Diversity
Whose Is This Song? (Bulgaria), dir Adela Peeva
Audience Award
Sasvim licno (Totally Personal) (Bosnia & Hercegovina), dir Nedzad Begovic