This year, DokuFest Film Festival in collaboration with Harabel Contemporary Art Platform, presented five of the films selected by the program (2021) for the public of Tirana, in the space near the Artificial Lake, on the evening of July 28th. The premiere came first in Tirana and later the festival will continue the annual program in the historic city of Prizren, during the dates of August 6th- 14th, 2021.
Short films from authors of different nationalities were shown during the screening: Bushi, Hana Sedoli & Ben Gorani (Kosovo, 2021); More than two hours, Ali Asgari (Iran, 2013); In Between, Samir Karahoda (Kosovo, 2019); Vever (for Barbara), Deborah Stratman (USA, 2019); Push This Button If You Begin To Panic, Gabriel Böhmer (MB, 2020).
Bushi – a girl left without her father, a film that deals with the cases of missing people in Kosovo. A story about the trauma and abduction of an innocent man by Serbian military forces, which left him presumed as missing to this day.
More than two hours – it’s 3 o’clock in the morning. A boy and a girl are wandering around the city. They are looking for a hospital to treat the girl, but it is much harder than they thought.
In between – brothers and sons living abroad build identical homes to express equality and unity in the family. An empathic portrait of families who, out of economic need, need to live most of their lives apart in cultures that are not their own.
Vever (for Barbara) – an intergenerational connection of three filmmakers seeking alternative opportunities for the power structures of which they are a natural part. Every woman extends her achievement towards a topic outside of her. Vever was born from the abandoned film projects of Maya Deren and Barbara Hammer. It was filmed at the far end of Hammer’s motorcycle trip to Guatemala in 1975 and was accompanied by Deren’s reflections on failure, encounter and initiation in the Haiti of 1950.
Push this button if you start to panic – Bartholomew Whisper went to the doctor today, where he met administrators who were eager for experimental surgery and solitary MRI machines. At least the hole growing in his head was becoming quite beautiful.
DokuFest brought an inclusive atmosphere for the fourth year in a row thanks to the cinematic diversity it conveys to the public. In this 20th anniversary of the international festival there were a number of 3000 applications from 60 countries of the world, where only 106 of them were selected to compete in 8 competitive categories.
