Balkan Film Week 2023

Bosanski Brodvej

Sixteen young actors have been selected to participate in a Broadway musical that established American artists are putting on in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Many of them are dreaming about a career outside this region and all of them begin rehearsals with great enthusiasm and expectations. But closer to the premiere the mood changes as the actors realise that soon, they will have to return to their old lives.

Cash & Marry

Marko and Atanas are two friends whose lives would be sweet as strudel but for an annoying little problem with their papers. They need a European passport and they are prepared to do almost anything to get one, including buying a wife. With nothing but their brass necks and 7,000 EUR, they set out to find the woman of their dreams – one who will walk them down the aisle and then hang around for a bit before the eventual divorce. An odyssey through Vienna’s immigrant netherworld, this real-life Green Card odyssey is an hilarious and touching insight into what it takes to jump the barriers of Fortress Europe.

Gică and Niculina live with their children surrounded by nature and far from modern society. When the Bucharest delta is designated a nature reserve, their alternative life in the wilderness comes to an end. In the city, they must find themselves again.

Loud bangs cut through the spring air. At Easter, firecracker noises are a familiar soundscape in southern Carinthia. The Slovenian language is not – not anymore. Before 1910, about ninety percent of all inhabitants in southern Carinthia spoke Slovene, today it is on average a single-digit percentage. In her essayistic documentary, Andrina Mračnikar formulates a highly political urgency in a personal way: What happens when one’s mother tongue is taken away in everyday life? What must politicians do to counteract the disappearance of a language whose protection is enshrined in the constitution?

Beckermann’s parents met in Vienna after the Holocaust. Tracing the migratory paths of her family before World War II, Beckerman returns to the European Jewish communities which inspired her childhood stories.

Swiss documentary filmmaker Nikola Ilić and his wife Corina Schwingruber Ilić talk about their life with Dida, Nikola’s mother, who lives in Serbia and is dependent on help because of her learning difficulties. When Dida can no longer be taken care of by her mother in Serbia, Nikola steps in. Despite the physical distance, he and his mother get to know each other and themselves anew.

First, there’s a dead rat hanging on the door of the house where Xhafer lives with his wife and children. Then the emails he sends are ‘accidentally’ no longer being received. The signs that this pharmaceutical engineer is being bullied and harassed in his workplace are increasing. Even if neither his wife nor his colleagues seem to believe him, this man, who is originally from Kosovo but who has been well integrated for years, feels more and more outcast from his (German) community. Or is he losing touch with reality?