26 July, 2022
This year also marks the 10th jubilee year of our flagship film training program 'Future is Here', supported for a decade by the National Endowment for Democracy. 21 high school students over the period of six months produced seven exceptional short documentary films fluctuated through wide-ranging issues. From films that deal with the past encapsulating stories of the pioneers of blood feud reconciliation in early 90's, or tell a beautiful love story despite the heartbreaking situation, to portrayals of very personal struggles of the youth, we are once again encouraged with the artistic potential of young people in Kosovo.
In 2021, we embarked on a new collaboration with the OSCE in Kosovo to support the New Wave of Kosovo's filmmakers in the making to organize Youth Film Camps to explore Human Rights through creative documentary filmmaking. 18 participants from Kosovo, Serbia and Montenegro through a collaborative filmmaking process produced five short documentaries that reveal the challenges of underrepresented members of the society. From an experimental observation of a can-collector living in extreme poverty to a story of a woman towards her journey to find herself, each film brings a strong point of view of the authors who are closely connected to the topic of their films.
Both camps were mentored by award winning filmmaker Blerta Zeqiri, a Future is Here alumni Leart Rama who is one of Kosovo’s most promising filmmakers and the head of our educational department DokuLab, Eroll Bilibani.
Our longstanding partnerships with film festivals Free Zone from Belgrade and MakeDox from Skopje bring similar stories produced through their own film training initiatives. 14 films will appear in a special selection by our partners, and DokuFest will host the visiting young filmmakers that will present their films to our Festival audiences.
The screenings of our film school with the presence of the young filmmakers are scheduled for Tuesday, August 9, and the partner film program will screen in two slots, on Wednesday, August 10 with the presence of the filmmakers from the region.
Full program can be found here