KLLEZNA - PLACE OF THE TREE BRIDGES

A documentary unraveling the untold stories and brutal experiences of the Kosovo War in the late 1990s.

Eliza Dushku takes on her homeland of Albania.

A documentary exploring how Albanians, including many Muslims, helped and sheltered Jewish refugees during WWII at their own risk, and trying to help the son of an Albanian baker that housed a Jewish family for a year return some Hebrew books that the family had to leave behind.

A mockumentary about four people and their idiosyncratic ways of saving the planet.

In northern Albania, ancestral customs still exist, governing the laws of vendetta between families. Sometimes, for generations, an old feud has pitted two clans against each other, condemning them to take turns murdering a member of the opposing family. This blood code, known as the Kanoun, has painful consequences for many Albanians, who are condemned to live in seclusion to avoid being killed.

Albania is the country in Europe that Europe probably knows the least about. Underdeveloped yesterday, Marxist today, breaking with the Kremlin, in friendship with Red China, we hardly know more. For journalists, the country of Enver Hoxha is one of the most closed 'hunting' territories in the world.

“Gjama” is a rarely practiced mourning ritual that was performed by Albanian men throughout the centuries. By shouting specific phrases and acting out a strict choreography, it is a way of paying respect to the deceased but also overcoming grief and pain over the loss of a loved one. Through the documentation of the re-enactment of the ritual, Zgjim Elshani seeks to recover fragments of the practice in the communities where this form of collective grieving is still a way of overcoming loss. By doing so, the project intends to rethink collective grieving and what it means to publicly display emotions in a male-headed society.

Children get ready to start the first grade. They start learning the first letters.

Benito Mussolini: Anatomy of a Dictator

Made by the highly influential Russian cameraman Roman Karmen, this documentary vividly features Albanian life immediately after the communists came to power in 1944. The film is especially memorable since it’s missing much of the heavy socialist realism that marked Albanian doc making. Shortly after he completed the film, Karmen set off for Berlin to shoot the Soviet victory over Nazi Germany.

The story of Viktor Stratoberdha (1921-1991) mirrors many of Albania’s tragedies. Stradoberdha’s humorous, buoyant style led him to be one of the country’s most promising filmmakers. But after being denounced in 1956, he was expelled from the Kinostudio and sent into internal exile. In 1967, Stratoberdha directed a local theater play in which the economic five year plan was placed in a coffin. He was then jailed for the next two decades. Urime Shokë Studentë! is one of the surviving documentaries of Viktor Stratoberdha’s all too short career.

No one knows why for certain, but from 1968 to 1973 communist Albania enjoyed a brief liberalisation in the arts. Banned books and Beatles records changed hands. Albania’s Nobel-nominated novelist Ismail Kadare wrote two of his most famed masterpieces, Kështjella (The Castle) (1970) and Kronikë në gur (Chronicle in Stone) (1971) during this period. The rock'n'roll and jazz arrangements featured in this concert documentary were the pretext that brought about the end to the artistic thaw. Several performers seen in the festival were sent to prison or internal exile. The portly, smiling music conductor, Gasper Çurçia, was later accused of forging bus tickets and executed.

A documentary that investigates the complexity of a nation, Albania, through the narration of the convoluted history of its monuments. What happens to the statues when they are destroyed, what are they replaced with and where do their marble shreds end up? What happens to their expensive bronze? And again: what do the sculptors who made these statues think of these destructions, what is their opinion. And today? Which statues are being destroyed in Albania today?

Stolen Kosovo is a Czech language documentary by director Václav Dvořák (b. 1948), about the Serbian–Albanian conflict in Kosovo. The documentary describes the situation, first in a short overview of the history of the area, followed by the 1990s conflicts and bombing of Serbia by NATO forces in 1999 and ending with the situation after the Kosovo War. The documentary focuses on the 1990s in the time of Slobodan Milošević's rule as well as on numerous interviews of Serbian civilians and, less, of Albanian insurgents against the Milošević regime.

One of the most recognizable voices in all of modern day music, Dua Lipa quickly rose to fame. Her catchy tunes and sultry vocals make her music appeal to a global audience.

Montenegro is the newest European country with a proud history, one that is being falsified for current political purposes, thus creating an alternative identity. In a nation where it possible for two brothers to claim different ethnic backgrounds despite having the same parents, everything is on the table: language, church, democracy. Can the truth set Montenegro free?

The rise and fall of Yugoslavian filmmaker Dušan Vukotić - the only Yugoslav Oscar-winner and one of the founding members of the Zagreb School of Animation - uncannily mirrors the tragic fate of his multiethnic country.

In the Kosovo War, human dignity was shattered by the terrors of the Serbian government and the Albanian liberation army. Truths about the victims’ fates faded away, which is why a Finnish forensic research group led by Helena Ranta got a mission to act as an unbiased agent and investigate the real course of events.

Albánie – kráska se špatnou pověstí

Filmmaker Mark Cousins goes to Albania for five days, and films what he sees. He discovers that the movie prints in the country's film archive are decaying. In investigating this, Cousins begins to encounter bigger questions about the history and memory of a place. Perhaps a country whose 20th Century, dominated by its authoritarian ruler Enver Hoxha, was so traumatic, should allow its film heritage to fade away? Perhaps a national forgetting should be welcomed? Influenced by the films of Chris Marker, Cousins' film broadens to consider the architecture of dictators and the great icon paintings of Onufri. In the past, when cartographers knew little about a country, they wrote on it Here be Dragons. Albania was, for decades, one of the least well know countries in the world. Cousins' road movie meditation takes the advice of Goethe: "If you would understand the poet, you must go to the poet's land."