04/08/2023
This year of DokuFest started with a reunion with one of the staff photographers, a girl I met six years ago in Tirana in a notary's office, while we were both preparing the documentation to go to Italy to pursue our studies. Yesterday, we found ourselves in Destill, in Prizren, discussing all these six years in our lives, waiting for the dawn of the day in which DokuFest would open. We both have different relationships with Prizren since I have been coming to Prizren for more than six years and for her it is the first time at this festival, as part of the staff.
In these six years, DokuFest has reflected on identity, truths, and lies and where they lie, on the consequences of the beginning and after the pandemic with the desire to start again, on survival, and finally on the approach to artificial intelligence in this age that is already redefining itself.
In these six years, summer belonged to Prizren, to films and endless love. We have encountered many borders facing us with so many dilemmas no suitcase can hold, and still I know that we return to films and documentaries to see life with completely new eyes. With eyes that lead up to the truth.
While our lives took completely different directions, the passion to tell and write our simple stories has encouraged us to break the borders, to return several times to our countries, but looking at Prizren and DokuFest with a lot of love.
DokuFest like every year travels to different cities to present a taste of the curated program of films and documentaries. This year I AM AI AM I found Tirana in the Open Air Park full of people. Like all the time and maybe rarely. And this brings me back to the feverish, almost hungry desire that people have to find something completely different on the screen. The utmost desire to be amazed, to breathe in other rhythms, as they sit and their minds wander.
DokuFest is about friendships, late nights, challenges, and comebacks. This was also felt in Tirana as soon as the stories began to unfold on the screen, but it is also felt in Prizren, like every year. For both of us, it is a precious moment to appreciate the cinema since the city where we have had the greatest contact with the cinema does not offer the daily step of living with the local films and filmmakers. DokuFest is a very important gateway to get to know Albanian films, and the thirst to get to know what is yours is hardly quenched.
As we wait for the opening, I think that nothing beats the feeling of peace on the opening night at Kino Lumbardhi as the new edition unfolds, standing with a drink in hand while watching what the DokuFest staff has prepared for each year.
If this is a love letter, then so be it!
Today the twenty-second edition of DokuFest starts and although every year the emotions of the past are renewed, what I think brings people and lovers back to this city is the space of hope that this festival and all the energy of the people behind this festival generate. From love to reflections, to borders, and to technology, this festival holds all the worlds that we flip through life between films, sounds, and emotions.
This year, I AM AI AM I leads the way to understand our place in the world, with the tools we ourselves create and try to know if they can surpass us. But it finds us again in the same place: sitting in cinema halls, reflecting on ourselves. As it should be.
OpEd by Blerina Kanxha
Photo: Elmedina Arapi
