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    • NTC Award Ceremony
      New Talent Competition gives young filmmakers from Central, Eastern and Southern Europe the opportunity to present their outstanding debut or second film to the public. Join us on Sunday 1 December at 19h
    • Music at ENFF
      The Eastern Neighbours Film Festival welcomes special musical guests each year to enrich our program. For this 16th edition, we’re thrilled to present two talented young musicians: guitarist Antonio Peršak (CR) and violinist İdil Yunkuş (TR). Together, they will perform a traditional Balkan dance and folk song, highlighting the beauty of this music through the… Read more: Music at ENFF
    • Masterclass with Janez Burger
      This masterclass presents a unique opportunity to explore Burger's distinct storytelling style, genre use, and exploration of contemporary social issues. Join us on Saturday 30 November at 17h - Room 5
    • Panel Discussion: Exploration of individual and collective memory in cinema
      Panel Discussion: Exploration of individual and collective memory in cinema on Friday 29 November at 18h

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.