volunteer adventures

The: DokuFest 2011 has just finished. Now I am back at my temporary home, here in Skopje, start to thinking about the last week in Prizren, experience and inspiration given to me.  Why was this festival so unusual and important, why it gave me the feeling that I really would like to come back there?

During all the festival I had been reading very enthusiastic guest columns, talking with people, listening conversation on the streets, experiencing extraordinary hospitality from volunteers and locals…my skeptical nature did not stop asking me “isn’t too much, to exaggerated, has Prizren not become a kind of this place that you just should be, leave your face on the photo, say to your friend I’ve been to Kosovo, isn’t it a kind of just a cool, fancy event, something that will soon pass and be forgotten, given a place to other similar, new and more underground event…?”.

Well, the only and right answer to all this questions marks in my mind is no, no, no! What I have experienced during these days was very authentic and impossible to compare to other things.

The great choice of documentaries and short movies, allowed everyone to find something for himself. For me personally the most important was the possibility to see section of Balkan Dox and National, which brought closer the Balkans history and culture. I will mention just one of short movie, which made a strong impression on me – Ninulla, addressed important issues for Kosovar society.  As directors Antoneta Kastrati and Casey Cooper Johnson said, it is high time to face the past and to start to deal with it and talk about it. Movie and art in general is a great field for dealing with such experience and can bring a kind of catharsis and relief. This festival is a window for such movies. I hope that more of them will be shown not only during the international festivals but also in Kosovo, Albania or other Balkans countries, it should be easily reached for them as well.

This festival changed Prizren into a movie city, with hundreds of people, holding DokuFest bags. Everyone seemed to be real open and close. While walking on the street you could easily bump into one of the main crew’s member and have a chat with him/her or drink Turkish coffee together. No matter if you were famous director, journalist, photographer or just an ordinary passerby, everyone were the same, just like a big family, connected with the passion for watching films.

I liked the idea of putting the Espan Rasmussen’s exhibition TRANSIT at Hamman Museum. One can say that the light was no perfect or there were luck of information about the pictures but, taking into account that in Prizren there is still no real photograph gallery, for sure it was a great event and I hope it will develop into regular exhibitions in this space. Moreover, on Saturday we could experience the Street Art on city’s walls, another proof of artistic soul of Prizren.

Open-air cinemas, wall above the Kino Ne Lum, which allowed people, passing by to stop and watch the films, bats flying through screens, street noise, outside the Lidhja e Prizerenit, lack of power, climbing to Kino Ne Kala, muezzin’s prayers, DokuNights, during which one could finally meet the locals, who simply could not attend film screenings during the day…all that things show how art and documentaries can be close to our daily lives. I strongly believe that  DokuFest does not make Prizren just a city of one annual event, which last 10 days but, as the executive director Alriza Arenli said:  “Our goal is to make the vital energy of DokuFest a daily happening”.