I had long heard about DokuFest – the most important film festival in Kosovo and one of the largest events dedicated to non-fiction in Eastern Europe, as well as an important venue for contemporary short films. The impressions I had heard over the years were always generous and enthusiastic, mentioning the rakija parties lasting until dawn, an extremely warm atmosphere, and, above all, a very substantial film selection, along with a commitment to human rights and peace – something that always moves me when it comes from festivals in those former Yugoslav countries that were subjected to genocide. Moreover, the chance to hear the festival’s artistic director, Veton Nurkollari, speak on a panel organised at Ji.hlava 2022, with so much poise and dedication, only heightened my curiosity. So, I didn’t hesitate when the opportunity arose to attend the festival, and I confess that I was counting down the days until my departure in early August – driven by the excitement of discovering a place I felt I would have otherwise struggled to get to if it was not for this great liaison (and, surely, privilege) that is cinema.

The journey to Prizren – the historic and multi-ethnic capital of Kosovo, a pivotal city in the history of the Albanian independence movement, as well as a vacation spot with terraces filled at night with tourists and expats returning home for the summer holidays – is as beautiful as it is tortuous. If you don’t happen to catch one of the few flights to Pristina (the contemporary capital, designated as such in 1948 by Yugoslav authorities when they declared Kosovo an autonomous region), your starting point is in neighbouring Albania, in Tirana, followed by a two-to-three-hour drive through the Albanian Alps (or, as they are commonly known, the Cursed Mountains), which ends in the small town built on the banks of the river known as Bistrica in Slavic languages and Lumbardhi in Albanian. (Just outside of it, one evening saw a fantastic performance by the Hungarian collective Kaos Camping, featuring dozens of film projectors running simultaneously, screening Soviet-era films, alongside phonographs and similar devices.) The river’s name is also carried by the festival’s main cinema, Kino Lumbardhi, with an impressive Soviet-style summer garden – where the first edition of DokuFest took place in 2002 – and a cultural space with a history of resistance: barely surviving the horrific war of 1998-99 and multiple attempts at demolition and privatisation by the authorities, it was eventually designated a historic monument through the efforts of the festival and its partners. In fact, half of the festival’s venues are open-air, including two stages in the Prizren Citadel, Sonar and Lunar, one built on the riverbank, Kino Lumi, and another on the rooftop of the DokuKino cinema.

Kino Lumbardhi also hosted the opening of this year’s edition, which I must say was probably the best “ceremony” I’ve ever attended in all my years of festival-going. No speeches – just an extended festival spot: a fast-paced montage, à la Adam Curtis, featuring all sorts of recent footage from social media – from the assassination attempt of Donald Trump and Netanyahu’s speech in the US parliament (and Rashida Tlaib’s protest) to a wide variety of TikToks (from grim images posted by IDF soldiers in Gaza to videos of dances and peaceful gatherings in public spaces) – interwoven with archival footage from the Yugoslav Wars. The montage was edited on Charlie Chaplin’s famous speech in The Great Dictator (1940), which I had heard so many times that I didn’t think it could still bring me to tears. But the mix of these hyper-real images and the fact of seeing them in a country whose suffering during the war was simply immense (a cry of empathy and solidarity, therefore, from a voice that knew all too well what it was talking about) was truly overwhelming. Then, the lights suddenly came on, followed by the unmistakable beat of the electric drums opening Blue Monday, New Order’s greatest hit – whose name was “borrowed” as the theme for DokuFest 2024. Here is the new order: one in which war, despotism, and fascism are once again a reality in our lives, exacerbated by techno-feudal capitalism and the social media hyperloop, while within this sea of anxiety and turbulence, there is hope (promise?) of another world. No speech could have expressed all this better or more effectively. The cherry on top: the opening film was Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove.

New (Old) Orders

Of course, these anxieties are by no means new (the new order perhaps being the fact that we are regressing to an older one) – it could even be said that the angst of the moment makes us susceptible to a hyperfixation on the immediate present, which has as a side effect a kind of historical-political-cultural amnesia. Therefore, the initiative of creating a section comprising films tinged with radicalism (at times even activism) from fifty years ago was more than appropriate: 1974: Then Is Now, with a selection curated by Eric Hynes from the Museum of Moving Image, along four lines – “Occupation and Resistance” (dedicated to Palestine), “Liberations” (focused on feminist movements), “Visitations” (promoting transnational solidarity), and “Addiction and Control” (about prisons and addiction rehabilitation programs). A great opportunity to revisit Kazuo Hara’s classic, Extreme Private Eros: Love Song 1974, which I had seen in 2018 at One World Romania – now, having reached (hopefully) a greater degree of maturity, I felt that there were some cracks in the extraordinary radicalism of protagonist Miyuki in her total rebellion against patriarchal gender roles. Besides revolutionary impulsiveness, I also saw much sadness in her, confusion, unmanageable anger, and, above all, loneliness – especially in the famous scene where she gives birth without any assistance (to a child she knows she will raise alone); perhaps now that a certain romantic veil has been lifted from my eyes, I understand a little better the hardships and sacrifices, including emotional ones, that come with a feminist struggle and the assumption of a radical position and identity.

On the other hand, I was much more inspired by the section dedicated to “rehabilitation” programs. Methadone, An American Way of Dealing (dir. Julia Reichert, Jim Klein) is a cold shower in the context of the opioid epidemic, advancing a disturbing thesis – that the social and curative model of the United States has always predisposed its citizens to opiate use, and the solutions it has found have been, with few exceptions from independent initiatives, either punitive or offering a false alternative (in this case, synthetic drugs). Last but not least, the program dedicated to Palestine was also an interesting occasion: although lacking a bit in quality – one of the shorts included here, a militarist propaganda film by the PFLP, might have benefited from a different context, here it was rather jarring – it had two highlights: Jocelyne Saab’s short film, Les femmes palestiniennes, and the intriguing dialogue between two writers in Lionel Rogosin’s Arab Israeli Dialogue.

Forms of Resistance: Palestinian, Cultural, Natural

Moreover, the festival fully embraced the Palestinian cause – and, to be honest, no other major European festival seems to have taken as clear and uncompromising a stance as DokuFest on this issue (after all, I imagine that a state like Kosovo, which has gone through war and is still struggling for unanimous diplomatic recognition, resonates even more with their tragedy). The Palestinian presence at the festival was truly transversal: both in the competitive feature and short film sections, and especially in the special section No Other Land. Featuring both the film that gave it its title and Kamal Aljafari’s A Fidai Film (along with his new short, UNDR), the section’s centrepiece was a screening of the epic film Route 181, made by two of the most important documentary filmmakers from Palestine and Israel, respectively: Michel Khleifi and Eyal Sivan, familiar to local audiences thanks to retrospectives organised by One World Romania. Divided into three parts – South, Center, and North – which together total 272 (!) minutes, Route 181 is conceived as a sort of road movie along the internationally recognised borders following the 1947 partition of the two states, largely violated after the 1967 war, with the filmmakers collecting interviews with people living and working along this line, from Gaza to Galilee.

What strikes you upon first viewing Route 181 is that the vast majority of those interviewed instinctively resort to the expression “there’s nothing we can do” – regardless of their stance on the occupation, and the variety is significant, even if most support the Israeli government’s official policy. Perhaps the most shocking moment in South (the part I managed to see) is the interview of an employee of a company that manufactures barbed wire fences. With a disturbingly calm and direct manner, he says that other countries don’t use products of the kind they do, “probably for humanitarian reasons” – a shocking self-awareness grafted onto that “what can you do” that floats in the air throughout the entire film, and the knockout blow comes with the line, “We almost shut down in ’95-’98, when with the Oslo Accords, because peace is not good business.” A dizzying, often disheartening journey that shows how brutal and arbitrary the occupation is and its power to completely dehumanise both victims and oppressors. Thus, another anthropological gesture in the section becomes all the more necessary: Lamees Almakkawy’s medium-length film Dancing Palestine. Half desktop movie, half performative documentary, the film explores the subversive and political potential of a dance style called “dabke”, preserving its image in an act of archiving that is essentially a form of resistance, of fight against the eradication of Palestinian cultural memory and, more broadly, against deculturation and culturicide.

The idea of preservation, resistance, and cultural survival, represented by both Kino Lumbardhi and the festival itself, is most fittingly mirrored in the thematic section Ode to Celluloid, from which I’ve managed to see two-thirds of the films: starting with Alpe-Adria Underground!, co-directed by curators Jurij Meden and Matevž Jerman. A film for curators and programmers, par excellence: both a brief history of Slovenian experimental cinema during the socialist period and an opportunity to save this vast archive through digitization – and the snippets I found here of one Karpo Godina’s cinema, hippie psychedelia infused with the subversiveness and aesthetic rigour of the Yugoslav Black Wave, were nothing short of a feast. The other film is also directed by a curator, Ehsan Khoshbakht (co-director of Il Cinema Ritrovato): Celluloid Underground (2023), an (auto)biography that playfully (but somewhat wistfully) jumps between formats, mapping his cinephile journey in an Iran where the Islamist government had banned the vast majority of both the international and its own canon – the encounter with a mysterious character (a cross between Langlois and Sabzian), who has dedicated his life to obsessively saving films that played in theatres before the ’79 Revolution in all sorts of basements in Tehran, proves to be fateful, in every sense of the word.

But the screening that stuck with me the most – along with that of Teddy Williams’ early shorts, the filmmaker in focus this year, where some minor technical errors turned into revelations for me, à la Jonas Mekas – was that of this little gem called Lichens Are The Way, by Ondřej Vavrečka, screened late at night in the citadel, while all sorts of sounds floated in from the city: the call of the muezzins, the music from the terraces, fireworks from weddings, the soundtrack of films screening at the other cinemas. A film composed mostly of time-lapse images, perhaps the best way to meet its living yet static subjects in all their kaleidoscopic variety, while, mostly in voiceover, the story of a gay couple of researchers who have dedicated their lives to the study of these primordial forms of life unfolds, seeking in their symbiotic way of living a model for rethinking how human beings cohabit and coexist with nature. The screen, the images on it, the forest nearby, and the people around coexisted in perfect harmony: and perhaps this is the new order to which we must aspire.

Flavia Dima

Film critic & journalist. Collaborates with local and international outlets, programs a short film festival - BIEFF, does occasional moderating gigs and is working on a PhD thesis about home movies. At Films in Frame, she writes the monthly editorial - The State of Cinema and is the magazine's main festival reporter.