Short Films, Big Stories
In this program, we bring you as many as 12 films that were (co)produced in nine countries! You can find documentaries that will disarm you with their sharpness, and make you think about existence, but also about the influence of political regimes on people’s lives. There are also several short feature films in which protagonists try to fight for their rights, change inefficient systems or analyze their own past.
3 DIALOGUES ABOUT THE FUTURE by Alina Manolache brings a discussion of three robots about life and what it means to be human. A PIGEON’S SONG by Eneos Çarka deals with the director’s family past during one of Europe’s harshest communist regimes. BABAJANJA by Ante Zlatko Stolica is an oneiric essay with the suspense of a horror awarded at Sarajevo Film Festival and MakeDOX. BOSNIAN BROADWAY by Jasmina Besirevic gives an insight into the lives of young people and their chances for success through the story of 16 actors from ex-YU who were cast in a Broadway musical. DISPLACED by Samir Karahoda won the prestigious Sundance Festival. Based on a true story of a post-war Kosovo ping pong club and two enthusiasts struggling to maintain it. RETREAT by Anabela Angelovska discusses the complicated ratio between the economic benefits and the trauma of war that US military base workers from North Macedonia back home.
SIGURIMI by Luigjina Shkupa talks about hundreds of thousands of bunkers marking Albania’s landscape as a symbol of the strange co-existence of the past and the present times. SNOW WHITE is a directorial debut by the famous Croatian actress Lana Baric about a woman who struggles with her painful past. It won the award for the best Croatian short film at Motovun Film Festival 2022. SOFT CREATURES by Ivana Skrabalo reveals how a hypersensitive teaching assistant of a boy with learning disabilities is forced to cope with a rigid school system. SPECIAL TRAINS by Krsto Papic is a powerful, authentic, and still relevant Croatian classic from 1972 about the bitter departure of Yugoslavian Gastarbeiters to Germany. Olmo Omerzu’s THE LAST DAY OF PATRIARCHY presents a challenging dilemma. Would a young, pregnant woman honor the last wish of her partner’s dying grandfather? WE, … COMPOSITION by Visar Jusufi is a touching, personal story about the director’s life as an immigrant in Germany, which won the prestigious Heart of Sarajevo award for the best short documentary film at the Sarajevo Film Festival 2022.