Without Kosovo
Sans le Kosovo
Directed by
United Kingdom
2017
22 min
- French
- Albanian
Documentary
In 1968, Asllan Gjinovci is a physics student at the University of Prishtina. Following his involvement in student protests asking for the autonomy of Kosovo in Yugoslavia, he's forced to flee the country. Setting him out on a three-year odyssey, hiding a few months in Croatia then spending two and a half years in refugee camps in Italy, to finally settle in Switzerland. His journey away from home inexorably keeps him away from his family and homeland for more than thirty years. As his daughter, Kosovo is an unknown part of my identity, mainly shaped by 90's news footage of the Kosovo war. So I decide to take my father on a trip to retrace his exile from the last refugee camp in Italy where he stayed to his birthplace in Kosovo. Seeking to explore the impact of this exile on his life and at the same time on mine.
Festivals
Credits
- Screenplay
- Dea Gjinovci
- Cinematography
- Dea Gjinovci
- Editing
- Dea Gjinovci
- Music
- Pierre Dao
- Production
- AMOK FILMS
Dea Gjinovci
Switzerland, Kosovo
Filmmaking gives me the possibility to focus on understanding the human experience — my role is to feel what my characters are feeling, and to go beyond that to interpret what their stories mean in the bigger scheme of things and how audiences can relate to them.
Dea Gjinovci is a Swiss-Albanian director/producer with a background in Economics and Anthropology living in between Paris, London and Geneva. She is a 2019 Sundance Talent Forum alum and 2019 Film Independent Fellow. Her award-winning documentary short, WITHOUT KOSOVO (2017), was screened at many international festivals and won Best National Film at DokuFest IFF as well as prizes at the Global Migration FF and Festival Cine Zaragoza in 2017. Her debut feature-length documentary WAKE UP ON MARS (2020) received support from the Sundance Film Institute and Ford Foundation JustFilms, and won the “Perspectives d’un doc” pitch award at Visions du Réel 2018 and it was selected at the Visions du Réel 2020 Online Edition. In June 2018, she co-founded Amok Films with fellow filmmaker Antoine Goldet in Paris.