Balkan Film Week 2025

Family Portrait of the Black Earth

An elderly woman battling cancer loses her breast and puts her husband’s love to the test by asking him to fill the void. In the ensuing humorous chaos, it turns out that hope can thrive in fertile ground when two people love each other deeply. The husband’s quest to find a replacement breast for his wife even ends up in a botany book.

As I Was Looking I Could See Myself Underneath

Home is a feeling, they say, but where is home, when you are not allowed to feel at home even within your own body and mind? A documentary unveils intimate stories of LGBTQ persons from Kosovo, going through their unceasing search for a safe place that allows them to be.

The six Albanian Burrneshas who tell their stories here want to decide for themselves how they want to live. They realised early on that the patriarchal society severely restricts their freedom. So they became Burrneshas and slipped into the social role of men in order to have agency, be independent and able to support their family economically, to escape forced marriages and harassment. And they have a lot of fun along the way, too. But breaking through gender barriers comes with a price. You stay a Burrnesha for life, sealed by an oath. The price of freedom is usually the renunciation of an openly lived sexuality, children and a family.

Like a Sick Yellow

We’re observing prenuptial family rituals on degraded VHS somewhere in suburban Kosovo, as a woman’s voice repeats: “She was so happy that they married her here, in this house”. A heavy cloud of war looms in the near distance. Norika Sefa, the winner of the Special Jury Award for Looking for Venera (IFFR 2021), returns to the festival with this mysterious and mesmerising tale about lives that are no longer there.

Once Upon a Family

The film director searches for Gorcin, the protagonist of his film, with the help of his friend Dragan. Their journey takes them to Gorcin’s ancestral village, where they get lost in isolated hamlets, transforming the quest into an allegorical journey into the unknown.

Emanuel spends his days at a sanatorium. Falling in love with another patient, he narrates his and his fellow patients’ attempts to live life to the fullest as their bodies slowly fade away, but their minds refuse to give up. Adapted from the novel by Max Blecher, Jude transports the story to a sanatorium on the Black Sea.

In the interior of a Croatian island, a group of women coming from different ex-Yugoslavia countries live in an unusual community trying to create a safe space for them and for generations to come. The islanders call them Witches of Brač. They do not believe in private property or hierarchy, and manage the community by direct democracy. Interpersonal relations and challenges brought by coexistence in nature, bring the survival of the community into question.

The ancient Sava runs like a thread through regions and towns of former Yugoslavia. It observes, makes comments and reveals deep insights. It gathers conversations with people that it once connected and now separates. Atmospheric images of nature meet real ways of life, presented experimentally from the point of view of the Sava. Pure poetry!