Home is a feeling, they say, but where is home, when you are not allowed to feel at home even within your own body and mind? As I Was Looking Above, I Could See Myself Underneath unveils intimate stories of LGBTQ persons from Kosovo, going through their unceasing search for a safe place that allows them to be.
When an actor leaves a project just before production, the director tries to finish his film without a protagonist while simultaneously contemplating about the nature of cinema and the imminent environmental destruction of his planet.
Aleksandra is in constant conflict with society's norms and her own self. Every day, she rethinks how she ought to act in the modern world and what sort of impression she makes. I AM NOT JUST A… is an honest portrait of our reality.
When ex-Yugoslavia began to fall apart, the Serbian regime banned Kosovar Albanians from participating in public life. Albanian employees across public institutions were fired. Albanian media outlets were closed down. Many elementary and high schools were closed to Albanian students and the entire university system was shut down. During the 1990's in Kosovo, teaching resumed in private apartments, houses and basements stores. This documentary shows how a parallel society and reality was organized. It shows how segregation and apartheid became the norm. Besa Luci and Mathieu Jouffre wrote the script for this challenging film together. In it people are in a relaxed atmosphere: eating, drinking, chatting and revisiting vividly one of the most exciting as well as tragic periods in the history of Kosovo.
A short documentary focusing on the narratives and lives of 5 different women of different generations, offering an anthropological overview of traditions, customs and gender relations in Kosovo.
Perhaps the most chilling testament to the ruthlessness of Albania’s communist regime, this documentary presents a public trial in a packed cinema: four young men accused of industrial sabotage and listening to foreign music. In the finale, replicating the Stalinist show trials of the 1950s, the audience applauds the death sentences for two defendants, and long prison terms for the other two who absurdly also lose their voting rights. The ice cold Poshnja is a rarely-screened, forbidden film (it is not even listed on the Albanian archive website) and the sole directing effort of Albania’s leading film scholar, Abaz Hoxha.
Irena, a young physicist, along with two of her colleagues, undertakes an important study far from home. She goes for a health check-up at the city hospital and learns that she suffers from leukemia. After recovering from her spiritual depression, she begins to come to terms with reality, appreciating every second of her life and the love she tries to avoid.
Theoretician Apostol Sacco writes articles and gives lectures on free love of youth at a time when a major conflict going on in his family.Conflict resolved through sitcom.
In the film "Composition" the plot is not classically constructed but from a subjective emotional state of the filmmaker himself, a condition that includes memories and scenes of our everyday life that follow us in the form of a mix between poetry, humor and nostalgia. The Balkan atmosphere dominates but it all turns into a universal message of love where the man and everything dear around him merge into one.
Can heartbeats be “reactionary”? Yes, if they are the only sonic element on a montage-heavy documentary about the war dead. Made just before Enver Hoxha’s cultural purges in 1974, Dhimitër Anagnosti’s formalist, wonderfully edited affair will finally premiere in a restored version after its completion forty-two years ago.
Short animated film about a girl who takes care of the geese.
Documentary film from 1986.
Documentary about the Albanian writer.
Documentary about the soprano Tefta Tashko Koço. It uses only photographs of her, as well as short interviews with various friends of her. Although the audio is not perfect, you can enjoy many fragments from her songs.
A girl and the peculiar interaction with her doll.
A young man in his late teens uses his sway in the family to cover for his cousin.
Vlora, an acting student, is chosen for the lead role in Sophocles’ play Antigona. The premiere receives significant attention, but less for Vlora’s portrayal of her character as for her undressing on stage. Vlora’s father is ashamed and forbids her from continuing with the play. Living in a conservative society the only person who supports Vlora is her younger brother. Vlora finds herself caught between her career and her family, and as she fights to defend her acting role, she learns she is fighting for her future.
Short animated film created in Akademia e Animacionit - Gen 7 (2024)
On the way to the city, where he is the city itself, Piti, although he resists, is encouraged into a process of change, where he is introduced to a rejected version of himself, in order to return whole.
When his car breaks down in a desolate rural area, Noir, an emotionally lost actor, accidentally meets Anna, an enigmatic girl who walks through the landscape as if he doesn't exist. Following her, he is drawn into a strange and poetic journey, where Anna's pauses and the landscape awaken hazy memories of a lost love. As reality and memory intertwine, Anna leads Noir to an old cemetery, where he discovers that she is long dead. Confronting her grave becomes his moment of awakening, realizing that the journey was a spur to accept the pain and restore meaning to his life.
