Gili Hoxhaj
One evening. The same festival. Two different artistic genres and two different worlds in one. This is precisely the purpose that the “FemArt” festival has carried for years: to bring inner worlds into collision with the reality outside. To become the voice of the secrets hidden within each of us. Without asking how much it hurts, it attempts to bring them to the surface in order to heal something. “Embrace the Unknown” is a journey that continues by discovering a new dimension of it every day. And based on this, the third evening of the “FemArt” festival centered on what is most familiar to us – family.
The things that emerge from it are the unknown, which, precisely when we fail to embrace it, can create turmoil that sometimes goes further than we can imagine, further than we can predict.
At the “Dodona” Theatre, the audience also had moments of laughter. Right from the start. Above all, the characters are full of different colors in their personalities. This is also reflected in their costumes. They carry something of each other’s colors, a little laughter, a little hysteria, a little anger, a passion for acting, and a passion for singing and playing instruments. They are sisters. They wrestle with their memories and celebrate them. Adults carry the weight of a childhood that only those who lived it alongside them can understand. Those with whom you ate at the same table and grew up under the same rules. Yet even their parents did not tell them the same things. Secretly, they seek to share with the audience this pride and “secret” among sisters – how, once, their father had told one of them: “You are the most talented.”
Luna, Winter, Toulouse and Jules De Cock from Belgium courageously open the door to an intimate world and invite us into their stories through the performance “Sisters.”
They break the ice with the audience right from the beginning. They have learned the words “Sisters” and “Thank you.” They expressed their enthusiasm for FemArt and Kosovo, and the audience invited them to come closer to read the subtitles. One of their dreams had been to perform “Sisters” – they were one more than the “Three Sisters” of one of Anton Chekhov’s best-known plays. Through acts that bring out stories, love and the confrontation with pain, they move from one act to another, through monologues, dialogues and music. Until one of them bursts out. Tired of the repeatedly revisited theme of divorce, she searches for a door that opens into peace. Trauma requires overcoming. The performance combined humor, authenticity, emotion and imagination. It strikes at the individual and the family. To belong and to be yourself at the same time.
What makes “Sisters” special is that the boundary between real life and theatre dissolves. The four sisters do not simply portray characters; they also bring themselves, their relationship, their relationship with the audience, and the story they share onto the stage. In this way, the performance becomes a reflection on sisterhood, family, and the way people who grow up together can simultaneously have completely different stories.
“Waterdrop” moved the audience to the cinema – with a drama that strikes deeper at family
For the FemArt audience, there was only a short break, just enough time for the walk from the “Dodona” Theatre to Kino Armata. They briefly meet at the entrance before the screening begins. They talk a little about the day’s encounters, the books that were promoted, the performance that made them laugh, and then head to their seats without knowing that the story on the screen is not a film with a happy ending. A story you carry with you from the cinema all the way home. It even makes you want to leave the cinema quickly, to escape this story, from a reality in which the righteous do not always triumph. The main roles are played by Gresa Pallaska, Arben Bajraktaraj and Adem Karaga.
Gresa Pallaska, playing Aida, a forty-five-year-old municipal official in a small city in southern Albania, on the shores of Lake Ohrid, is forced to confront the machinery of a corrupt system, of which she herself is also a part, when her adolescent son, Marku, faces the possibility of a prison sentence for raping a classmate. Only when she confronts the system and tries to bring justice to light does she sink even deeper into its darkness. As a mother, she forgets everything else – food, work, her husband – and wants only to get her son out of prison. This situation shatters everything – her career and her family – and forces her to question her role as a mother in raising her son. Along the way, Aida realizes that she is alone in this fight. After learning the truth about her son, she can no longer look him in the eye or speak to him. Her world breaks apart. Even though everyone else continues as before, nothing moves at the same pace for her anymore.
In an hour and a half, the director manages to knock on the human conscience. To show the side of power, cunning, indifference, and the disordered lives of adolescents. Adolescents who place more trust in the power of their parents, even when it comes to their wrongful actions.
While everyone else continues living on top of injustice, Aida, stripped of all the truths, can no longer have lunch in the same way, nor can she participate in life in the same way. She remains a mother who seems as though she may never be able to forgive herself. There is despair in her gaze, and it sees more deeply into the truth and the consequences it leaves behind. Others live with the weight of guilt while ignoring it. For Aida, the family is no longer a safe haven. Marku is no longer the child she believed she had raised, her husband is not the man she thought he was, and the leader of the place where she lives is the crown of a system that, in order to protect itself, excludes everything else.
“Waterdrop” has been screened at international festivals, including the Warsaw Film Festival, Göteborg, Cottbus, Sofia and Bari. “Waterdrop,” directed by Robert Budina, with a screenplay by Robert Budina, Doruntina Basha and Ajola Daja, was also selected to represent Albania in the race for the Oscar for Best International Feature Film at the 97th Academy Awards.
