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    • New Talents Open Call
      Eastern Neighbours Film Festival (ENFF) began in The Netherlands in 2008 with the idea to offer Dutch and international audiences a unique glimpse into the cinema of their neighbors from Eastern and Southern Europe. This annual event presents the most recent, exciting, and thought‐provoking films, from countries with small, but often powerful film industries, that… Read more: New Talents Open Call
    • ENFF 2023 On Demand!
      Unable To attend the festival in person? No problem! From November 27th to December 3rd, we’re thrilled to bring you a curated selection of this year’s films available for online viewing! Catch our captivating Opening Film Ivan’s Land, or the touching Closing Film Seventh Heaven. Or explore a collection of shorts from the New Talents Competition! Follow along… Read more: ENFF 2023 On Demand!
    • What’s up in Slovak Cinema? A conversation with Monika Lostakova
      We talked with Monika Lošťáková about contemporary Slovak cinema.
    • ENFF and the Eastern European Film Festival Network!
      The Eastern European Film Festival Network brings together five film festivals dedicated to promoting and showcasing Eastern European cinema, alongside one partner organisation.
    • Masterclasses
      Through these masterclasses we approach two memory in film from different angles: memories from a personal or collective recollection through archive material.
    • Work in Progress
      In Work in Progress, emerging filmmakers and artists will present their works in development to the audience and engage in discussions with Dutch experts.
    • Festival Timetable Available!
    • Check out the catalogue for our 2023 edition!
    • Music at ENFF
      Every year, ENFF brings special musical guests who bring beauty to the program and further represent the rich cultures of their countries to a Dutch audience.
    • Film Marathon
      Join us for the Film Marathon, a new concept in which we merge two components, Short Films, Big Stories, and New Talents Competition into a whole-day screening of short films!

Women’s Power

In the last decade, there is an advent of extremely talented, daring, efficient young female directors in Eastern Europe. Especially in the Balkans where, almost as a rule, men mostly directed fiction features and women documentaries, animations and shorts. Lately, women directors from Kosovo, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Bulgaria and Serbia a.o., represent their countries at the biggest film festivals, winning awards with their fiction features. These powerful women bring new topics to be discussed, or they look at the known from a different angle, and their films serve also as an inspiration to the empowerment of the female population in their societies. Very often, the main characters in their films are ordinary yet extraordinary women embedded masterly in a well-researched political and social environment in the director’s home countries.

This edition, we have a strong female line-up in our special program Women’s Power – the feature debuts by two directors from Kosovo, Antoneta Kastrati and Lendita Zeqiraj. ZANA by Kastrati, whose documentary ‘Weddings And Diapers’ was screened previously at ENFF, tackles in a very refined manner her home country’s patriarchal attitude and prejudices as she unfolds the story of a woman who cannot get pregnant, and being unable to give birth makes a woman be seen as a failure.

AGA’S HOUSE by Lendita Zeqiraj deals with Kosovo after the war, the country of women whose husbands, brothers and fathers went missing or were killed during the war. Female solidarity is very present, yet each of them hides a secret. Earlier, ENFF has screened Zeqiraj’s short film ‘Balcony’ which made her well known at the European film scene.

The work of Ines Tanovic from Bosnia and Herzegovina is recognized internationally by her awarded strong documentaries. ENFF also screened her fiction feature debut ‘Our Everyday Story’. Her latest film THE SON, that opened last year’s Sarajevo Film Festival, is a dramatic account on a Bosnian couple, whose adopted teenager son starts violently acting out.

MARE by Andrea Staka, the Swiss-Croatian director whose fiction feature ‘Das Fraulein’ we screened at ENFF, digs deep in the dissatisfaction of a married middle-class woman with a seemingly comfortable, “normal life” and features the brilliant performance of Croatian actress Marija Skaricic.

In the Serbian film AJVAR, the debut by Ana Maria Rossi, a woman has a strong voice too and a will of her own. It is a bitter-sweet drama of a married migrant couple that deals with mid-life crises and nostalgia, spiced with well-balanced Balkan humour and strong actors’ performances.