July 9, 2025
We began programming this edition while two wars were unfolding. By the time we reached the final stage, a third, catastrophic in scope had begun.
War today is not episodic. It is perpetual. It is the dominant climate of our time, fueled by greed and cloaked in language that seeks to justify the unjustifiable.
The title we have chosen is not thematic. It is diagnostic. Endless Greed Mental Void is not a concept. It is a condition. A reflection of how difficult it has become to think clearly in the presence of endless suffering. A record of our inability to respond proportionately to horror.
Rooted in a post-war society, Kosovo, our festival does not stand as a neutral witness. We have lived through terror. We remember how it speaks. What we are seeing now is not new. What is new is how visible it is, how instantly available, and how little that seems to matter. We scroll past agony. We absorb injustice. We live through fatigue.
In Hold Everything Dear, John Berger writes:
“Shame, as I'm coming to understand it, is a specific feeling which... corrodes the capacity for hope.”
This is the atmosphere we are working in. A corrosion of hope. A paralysis of speech. Never before have we hesitated so much before announcing a theme. Not because we lacked vision but because vision itself is now suspect.
What is the role of art, of cinema, of documentation, when the act of watching becomes indistinguishable from inaction? We ask this not rhetorically but as a demand. We ask it of ourselves.
This year’s programme is an attempt to resist numbness. To reclaim language from manipulation. To insist that the act of telling, listening, and gathering still matters.
We offer these films, conversations, and music as counter-movements. Against the void. Against the seduction of detachment. Against the ongoing rehearsal of forgetting.
