To mark this occasion, Lumbardhi’s Fjolla Hoxha and Malibu (Barbara Braccini) have an exchange prior to the event.

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FH: Artistic interpretations aside, who is Malibu in your own words?

M: Malibu is literally *me*, Barbara. Despite the possibly ironic-sounding name I’ve picked for no good reason at all, the music I write under this alias is 100% me, it’s like a diary, all the stories I tell are my own heartbreaks and nostalgia.

FH: Your performances are described as immersive sea-like sonic experiences. Where does your connection with the ocean come from and how does that influence your work?

M: I grew up near the ocean, my dad is an oceanologist, while growing up, my nanny had a dolphin obsession…. maybe all these things are subconsciously emerging when I make music, I’m not exactly sure. I’m an over-thinker, to the point of making myself sick, so maybe I need the organic loudness and quietness of the waves to balance that. My head is empty when I’m at the ocean, which maybe is what happiness feels like.

FH: How would you describe the zone where the musical and the cinematic experience meet and interact in your performance?

M: If we say the « cinematic » part is basically the visual aspect of it, I think they have to exist together; one supports the other and vice-versa. The music can be intense and full, and very visual, it invites the listeners to go into somewhat of an introspection, so it’s important that what they *see* supports what they may be feeling. A blinking star, a boat offshore, whatever it is, it lulls the listeners and gives meaning to it all, hopefully…

FH: Can you talk a bit about your entrance to the music world and what direction your journey is currently taking?

M: I came to it out of passion a few years ago through a friend, and I guess it gradually became my life, essentially. Without thinking about it that much, it took the direction it took ; today I’m not interested in making this or that « move » for it to become whatever else, I’m happy to see where it goes and be surprised, maybe! My radio show on NTS is a constant, kind of « keeps me going » monthly, so we’ll see where this goes too!

FH: Are there any emerging topics or urgencies that you wish to tackle with your work in the near future?

M: I don’t think so, nothing in particular that I can think of. Maybe being heartbroken is what will make me continue to write music I suppose. Heart needs to either be empty or so full, it could explode in order for me to have anything to talk about.

This ephemeral experience filled with a distinct atmosphere will be preceded by a special screening and followed by a closing session.

To keep track of the event, please attend to the link here and follow us on instagram.

The event starts at 20:00 and entry to the performance is free of charge. 

The event is supported by Raiffeisen Bank in Kosovo and The French Embassy in Kosovo.

Kosovafilm is a public film production, distribution and screening company which was established in 1969. Together with RTP (Radio Television of Prishtina), the company had a major role in the development of the cinematographic culture in Kosovo. It produced more than 35 films, including fiction, documentaries, and animations. Kosovafilm has also imported and distributed more than 200 films, mostly from Europe and the US. However, the revitalization of the film production in Kosovo coincided with the beginning of a political repression against the country in the early 1980s in Yugoslavia.

Kosovafilm: Fragments screened 5 films from those divisive years, including films by well-known directors such as Isa Qosja, Besim Sahatçiu and others. In addition to aesthetic values ​​on the one hand, through their cinematic metaphors, enigmas, mysteries and tensions, the films present a glimpse of the contradictory existence of a country.

The screening of the film ‘Proka’ was accompanied by a live conversation between the film director Isa Qosja and the program curator, Tevfik Rada.

Below, we bring you the full conversation.

Tevfik Rada: Thank you very much for coming, for accepting our invitation for an interview, Mr. Isa Qosja.

“Proka” is your debut film, my favorite film in this program. But before we come to Proka, I will ask you some questions about your artistic background. How got you to cinema? What were your studies like at the academy? What films did you make before “Proka”? What were your short films as a student and who did you collaborate with at the time?

Isa Qosja: Before I went to the Academy, I was an actor at the Prishtina Theater. I spent about 10 years as an actor. If anything can be said about those 10 years, about their worth in my artistic life, then I can say that experience helped me later with directing. However, the question arises: ‘why would an actor leave the stage to get behind the stage?’. Let’s just say I had exhausted my interest in the stage. So, I played some roles and saw there’s so much an actor can do. He plays one character, continues with another and so on. So, I continued with my artistic interest aiming at directing. Of course, directing was a field not well researched for me, in terms of the overall concept. In terms of what I had to do in the future, directing was quite enigmatic because I knew there are a lot of arts being synthesized within directing. The film synthesizes the art of literature, the art of music, the art of photography, of course, and the personal art of thinking. I was motivated by this profession. Remember, creativity is motivation. It is not just going behind the camera; you have the actors in front of you and you do whatever you want. No, motivation is very important. I became a directing student at a not very young age, sometime around the age of 29. 

What did I work on as a student? I worked on some of the classic assignments, on some of the ideas that were the fruit of my curiosity about certain topics that for me constituted research towards my creative identity, but that presented more and more dilemmas in all directions and situations. 

The moment I watched Fellini’s film Amarcord, I told my professor ‘I do not want to study directing further’. ‘Why?’ – he asked, surprised. ‘Because I will never be able to do something of such a high ideo-aesthetical level.’ So, my dilemma of continuing my studies lasted for a while. I took it very seriously. However, I continued with the conviction that I should dedicate myself even more to this craft. In my third year, I made a film based on Beckett, which no one ever intended to make into a film. Beckett was theater. Somehow a guaranteed failure. It is very static and stable on stage, but not an experiment for film. However, I made a short film that was rated quite well so at the end of the year I worked again with another Beckett text. I was obsessed with Beckett’s texts. So, at the end of the third year, I shot and made a stage film called “Ah Joe”, a film and theater play with which I graduated. Faruk Begolli played in it, and this marks his first appearance on the theater stage. Half of this film was theater and half film. The moment Faruk, who played John, enters the stage, he enters through a stage designed film strip, and so the projection ends with his entry on stage, where the play begins. The moment he leaves the theatrical stage, he does so by coming out through the same performance of the film strip. The exterior was filmed accompanying the actor, wherever he acted. This experiment was much liked by professors and viewers. My other student short film was ‘The Suicide Squad’, also a research topic. Which of the characters carries out a suicide most effectively? These and some others are my films from the time I was a student at the Academy of Film, Theater and Television in Belgrade.

Tevfik Rada: And where are these films?

Isa Qosja: They are at the Academy. The Academy of Belgrade preserves all these films and I think that every student who studied there had to leave the films in the student archive of the Academy. It’s quite logical to put films there, it’s reasonable. Unfortunately, I did not have the vision to take any with me then because I considered that when I close that chapter over there, I do not need that part of my biography.

Tevfik Rada: When did you come from Belgrade to Pristina?

Isa Qosja: I came back in 1982, I worked in Prishtina television for three years, in a show called ‘Late Hours’. A three-hour show with a journalist who now lives in the US, Hys Shkreli, who in my estimation has been very talented in his work as a journalist.

Tevfik Rada: As far as I know, directors in Yugoslavia were employed as freelancers (independent artists), meaning they did not have a regular employment contract.

Isa Qosja: It depends. So, there were some, but there were also those who were regular.

Tevfik Rada: “Proka” was made in 1984. Can you tell us a little about the technical details, how it was made, how the film was financed?

Isa Qosja: I want to reveal a detail that I have not revealed before. When I switched from working at TV Prishtina to Kosovafilm, I was offered a project called ‘The Bridge’. A qualitative scenario themed around a bridge that was worked on by day and demolished by night. This topic is familiar to us, but it was developed into a very attractive scenario. The budget for this project was about one and a half million marks and this amount was provided. My friend Agim Sopi had a script called ‘The Man from Soil’ and the director of Kosovafilm at that time was a man whom I remember with great respect, who is no longer among us, Azem Shkreli. I said to him, ‘Azem, why aren’t we sharing this budget with Agim’s project?’. I had already read ‘Proka’ as a treatment so we decided to divide the budget; he made the movie ‘The Man from Soil’, I made ‘Proka’ and we forgot ‘The Bridge’ which had the highest cost, since it required the construction of a bridge by The Holy bridge of Gjakova. Its scenography was costly. So that project was forgotten and in the meantime the budget for filmmaking started to decrease hence as the time went by, the commitment to art in general, dropped down.

Tevfik: The movie “Proka” is very interesting, and it has an anachronism, something that I think was done intentionally. For example, there are inquisitions, but there are also officers with weapons, there is a village that is backward, undeveloped, a village that is full of water but does not have technology to use water. The timing of the film is also a bit vague, however I think there is something at least on a symbolic level that resonates with the nationalist atmosphere of Yugoslavia, which became clear during the 1980s. What do you think about that?

Isa Qosja: The film goes beyond local frameworks. How? Through the costumes, the people who naturally behave between what is called a civil and religious behavior, between what is called religious and servile to the ascendancy, so these are the elements that open the frames for it to be a universal film. These relationships exist in every country, the secular and the religious, the relationship between those in power and those who are always subject to power. Of course, other relations too such as those of the human with their ambitions and desires. I here had the basic purpose of sketching an autochthonous man who can also resemble the fate of a Mexican, Portuguese, Peruvian person that mainly deals with his work, ideals, illusions, dreams, commitment, efforts, but in our environment this character always becomes the focus of the obsession and the curiosity of others, and this curiosity produces punishment. This is tragic. So, we, who want to do something completely personal, are obsessed with the punishing curiosity of others. This is an evergreen topic in this country and many others, but in provincial settings, more or less, this is a crucial topic. I think that ‘Proka’ aims to portray this phenomenon and then come others where the properties of people are naturally scattered in different fields and directions and those properties are either self-managed or managed by others. They are mostly managed by others, and we always come to a bad conclusion. I do not make movies with a happy ending; I try to show what should not be done. So, if serious scenes dominate my films, I do it so that people can see how bad it is, how worthless it is, how troublesome it is and how unacceptable their behaviour is. Imagine if people were to invest as much positive energy as they do on negative energy, how much more beautiful this world would be. A wise man once said: ‘when you deal with trivial work, you do not have time to deal with important work’.

Tevfik Rada: What was the reaction of the audience and critics in Kosovo and Yugoslavia towards this film?

Isa Qosja: The reactions were mainly of the ideo-aesthetical level. I remember the critique of a good film journalist in the former Yugoslavia named Mitić who wrote that every picture of this movie looked like a fresco hanging on the wall. For me this diminished the ideological impact of the film. In my work I try to make sure that each frame has an aesthetic dimension, even when dealing with drama or a cold atmosphere, I have to see the cold to warm up. In our environment there were those who asked questions about where this event takes place. I remember then there were journalists who asked why there is no folklore incorporated in costume design, scenography or in the dialogue, you know, to identify the place and time of the event. It is natural that in the first films of our cinematography this dimension is required, it is natural because we were marking the beginnings of our autochthonous cinematography. Up until then, the main investors in the construction of the basic infrastructure of filmmaking; directors, cameramen, actors and generally technicians, were from other republics, mainly from Serbia. Generations that came back from Zagreb or Belgrade enabled the beginning of the production with complete infrastructure here in our country; screenwriters, directors, cameramen, actors, scenographers, costume designers, voice actors, all. So, the Kosovar film started to be produced.

Tevfik Rada: In your next film ‘Guardians of the Mist’ dating back to 1988, the character is again a lone dissident intellectual, opposed to Serbia’s police and secret services. However, unlike ‘Proka’ this time, the film takes place openly in Ranković’s era. Within the Kosovafilm: Fragments program, we have seen other films where I can say that the open or secret reference to Ranković’s time is one of the most important. For example, in ‘The Wind and the Oak’, but also in ‘The Man from the Soil’. How do you see this anachronism of the ‘80s? How was the atmosphere back then?

Isa Qosja: Of course, our cinematography had no political purpose, however that arrhythmia had to be addressed because it was necessary. Thus, some of the good works, to call it conditionally good were born, through the treatment of this topic which disturbed the artistic and political opinion in the former Yugoslavia. Without modesty, I can tell you that a bit of credit for the contribution to the most articulated rebellion of the Albanian people of Kosovo in those years belongs to these films, namely ‘Man from the Soil’, ‘The Guardians of Mist’ and ‘The Wind and the Oak’. I consider that this contribution was welcomed both politically and artistically by Slovenian and Croatian creators. Serbian journalists and public opinion described them as nationalist films. I do not think so. However, after a few days of screening in Prishtina, the film was prohibited in Prizren, on the sixth day of its screening, as far as I remember.

Tevfik Rada: The film ‘The Guardians of the Fog’ was the last film produced by Kosovafilm, right?

Isa Qosja: No, I also worked on ‘Kukumi’ within Kosovafilm.

Tevfik Rada: I mean before the war.

Isa Qosja: Yes. Before the war, yes.

Tevfik Rada: In what year was ‘The Guardians of the Fog’ banned in Prizren?

Isa Qosja: In the year ‘87 or ’88, right? You can correct me if I am wrong. It was banned and it has not been shown since then because of the violent measures and a whole history of events that followed until the liberation of the cultural space in Kosovo.

Ares Shporta: What was the role of filmmaking in the ’90s and what were the opportunities within the impossibility to deal with film in Kosovo in the’ 90s?

Isa Qosja: Well said, opportunity within impossibility, this is what it actually was. It used to be very difficult to go out with a photographic camera on the streets. A photographic camera. 

Not to mention the film cameras. I did however write a screenplay for a TV film. The question arose though ‘Where to shoot it?’. We did not dare to do it outside so we shot it in Isniq, inside a tower. The whole film was shot there. Istref Begolli, Nexhmije Pagarusha, Mentor Zymberaj, Anisa Ismajli and others played in it. That was in 1990, as far as I can remember. We got the technology from Slovenia, the cameraman as well. So, even if we were trying to shoot something, we had to go inside, in the interior, to avoid being seen on the street by any circumstances. The police stopped me once, found some pages of the director’s book, took me to the police station and detained me until the evening.

Ares Shporta: What is the name of the film and can we see it somewhere?

Isa Qosja: Mentor Zymberi was its producer and he should have it.

Tevfik Rada: What is the name of the film?

Isa Qosja: “The Living Sphinx”. So, it had nothing to do with Serbs. However, everything that smelled of art had to do with Serbs.

Ares Shporta: As a film and cinema community, how did you experience the gradual degradation, closure, and non-return of cinemas to the public space in Kosovo? That is, during the beginning of the ‘80s we had 42 cinemas, if I am not mistaken and in 2013 when this cinema was reopened (Kino Europa), only the ABC cinema operated in Prishtina. How did you experience this and was there any mobilization, any request to change the situation on your part?

Isa Qosja: The experience of a creator whose cultural spaces are usurped is terrible. You can guess. It was pointless for a regime to think that the cinema was a place where enemies could be forged. That is why cinemas were closed. There was no more scent of movie theaters. There was no longer a projector beam, a meeting place for filmmakers. Yet we met in peripheral cafes and almost did illegal work by talking about art and projecting some ideas for cultural activities. This also happened with my TV film that I talked about earlier. In the cafe ‘Prestige’ I met Istref Begolli. He came with a notebook with wide lines, one or two pencils, and an eraser. We talked about his role; he took notes. We discussed and we were happy we could do that. Imagine, Istref Begolli, an acclaimed actor with such a rich career, appreciated all over, was forced to work this way. At the corner of a café in the outskirts. What a miserable situation!

 I was still going to Kosovafim and one day the director of Prishtina television came to me and told me ‘You are being expelled from Kosovafilm for non-compliance with the measures. Everything went under the control of the police authorities.

Beyond the questions, I want to say that currently and fortunately, Prizren is the capital of culture in our country. Here we have a festival that is very important. People around the world have asked me about DokuFest, expressing a desire to visit the festival and Prizren. Directors, distributors, film selectors. In addition, you have creators, so you have people who articulate the cinematic voice quite powerfully around the world and you have many reasons to be on the forefront in the realm of cinematic culture. I am happy that this is the situation, and I am happy that this happened exactly in Prizren. Despite the fact that I wished the hall could be full tonight, this in no way denies my desire to come to chat with you and people who love cinema. I wish you all the best and hope to see you again.

Tevfik Rada: Thank you very much. 

This interview was made possible through the “Cultural Spaces of Kosovo” project, supported by the European Union.

During the first two decades of socialist modernization, a very small number of films and documentaries were made in Kosova, compared to other Yugoslav countries. Out of 2977 productions (both fiction films and documentaries) that were made throughout the period of former Yugoslavia (1945-1966), only 32 films and 9 documentaries were made in Kosova. No local director contributed to their making and there are no films in the Albanian language from that time.

Unable to represent itself, Kosova was instead presented from the outside, through the imaginary of Mitrović, which Vehap Shita rightfully identifies in his assessment that “we have become recognised by the wider Yugoslav public and the world of cinema through the films of Žika Mitrović.” (Shita, 1962, p. 841)Therefore, the question that should be posed to start this analysis is: In what way does Captain Lleshi represent Kosova?

According to Vehap Shita, both of the Captain Lleshi films (Captain Lleshi and Gunfight) are artificially constructed, populated with untypical things, and misinformation. Moreover, he states that “Mitrović’s Captain Lleshi, especially in the second part of his cycle in Gunfight, has very little to do with who we are and is not created or imagined according to our perspectives and worldviews. ” (Shita, 1962, p. 841)

If the epic figure of Captain Lleshi does not represent the true face of Kosovo, as Shita says, then what was the main motivation for Mitrović to create such a film? Was Captain Lleshi a film commissioned for a particular political cause or was it just a good commercial opportunity, for financial gain and easy entertainment without having to worry about the consequences that such a representation might have carried?

In Albanian literature there are two different interpretive variants regarding the metaphorical messaging of the character of Captain Lleshi, and his ideological structure is constructed precisely on the basis of these two main components.

The first component is that which states that the film reveals a certain historical period and events that are generally considered as a sensitive and controversial topic within the Kosovar discourse. Consequently, it differs from other partisan films in that it does not show the fighting between the partisans and the Germans (except at the very beginning of the film)—as we are used to seeing in most partisan films—but focuses on the suggested local contradictions between the partisans themselves, namely Captain Leshi, and the ballistic gang led by Kosta, who count amongst their members, Ahmet, the brother of Captain Lleshi.

The second component is that which reveals that the whole cinematic adventure tries to be presented from a tacitly imaginary, or fantastical point of view. That Mitrović was not only satisfied in using the classic American Western style to reap success with his films, but that he also tried to incorporate ‘oriental’ visual elements (the spectacular clash between partisans and ballists at the Teqe of Saraçhana Helveti) and elements of ‘the exotic’ (the appearance of Albanians in traditional national costumes in the city tavern in Prizren), to stimulate in the public what is known as ‘the charm of the unfamiliar.’

Literary critic Vehap Shita is concerned with the second prong of these ideological forms, more precisely, in the cultural representation of Kosovo within these films. Here we are again, making reference to Shita, as it was he who  made a cursory analysis of Mitrović’s films in his article ‘The Cycle Captain Lleshi and the Yugoslavian western’, published in the cultural-scientific journal Përparimi.

Shita claims that “while [in his]documentaries it seems to me that he followed a very good methodology [in his] presentation […], in the feature films thematizing our province, Žika Mitrović is more one-sided in terms of the motives or the treatment, and the genre he has chosen for their treatment.” (Shita, 1962, p. 837).

Finally, Shita emphasises that although Mitrović simply did not have even a basic understanding of the past or present, nor the psychology and mentality of the Kosovars, he does not consider “that his undertaking has bad intentions.” Shita insists that Mitrović was in a hurry when he completed the cycle of Captain Lleshi (especially Gunfight), and it was for this reason that he did not go deeper into the cultural heritage, in particular, the folklore and customs, and was instead informed only by things discussed here and there, and from reading sensational reports from certain journalists. (Shita, 1962, p. 840).

On the other hand, we also have the perspective of Arben Xhaferi, in the article ‘Captain Lleshi or Modeling of the Acceptable Albanian’, who insists that the realism of Captain Lleshi was not merely a commercial accident, but “an invention of the Yugoslav (Serbian) intelligence services of Ranković’s period, the Chief of the police and the security services of the country who [would] leave their posts in the IV Plenum of Brioni (1966).”

Moreover, Xhaferi emphasised that Captain Lleshi represents “a ‘positive’ model of the Yugoslavised Albanian; loyal and brave, who pursues, punishes, and liquidates Albanian ballists and nationalists that hindered their integration into the new system.”

In my opinion, both critical views of Captain Lleshi are one-sided and limited, because they concentrate only on one ideological component of the subject. Xhaferi tries to interpret Captain Lleshi from the political context, however his writing is permeated by a subjective and sensational momentum and indeed, a populist tone, full of preconceived categorisations, conjectures and assumptions, unable to argue them according to a theoretical-scientific methodology. Whereas Shita, although more objective, has a typically literary approach, focusing more on the description of the psychological motives of the characters and of the subject, but leaving aside the influence of the political and institutional circumstances of the country at the time.

Regardless of the fact that in Captain Lleshi, Mitrović tries to show the resistance in the partisan liberation war, we cannot say that it is a revolutionary film that shows the collective spirit of the partisans and a people’s mobilisation, but rather that it idealises and glorifies the superiority of the individual who is largely based upon the conventional standards of American Western commercial films.

In order to better understand the symbolic meaning of Captain Lleshi, we will take another critical journey, adapting Will Wright’s structuralist theoretical concepts in his important book Six Guns and Society: A Structural Study of the Western.

Will Wright has stated that the Western is a myth for contemporary American society. He challenges the theoretical views of Levi Strauss and other anthropologists, that primitive societies have myths while modern societies have history and literature. According to Wright, modern America has myths that resemble popular stories and the Western is one of them. 

Making a detailed analysis of Western films, Wright comes to the conclusion that the mythical structure of the classical Western has three sets of main characters; the gunman, the homesteader and the rancher, who can then be interpreted in three mythical guises as the hero, the society, and the villain. These characters operate through an oppositional structure of identification: inside/outside, good/bad, strong /weak, wilderness/civilisation.

As we will see below, the opposition inside/outside presented by Wright cannot be said to fit perfectly onto the oppositional structure of Captain Lleshi. Nor is the wilderness/civilisation contrast applicable to Captain Lleshi’s narrative—although these two categories are similar, Wright maintains that they are not identical.

According to Wright, in contrast to the inside/outside dichotomy, society and the villain are internal units of differentiation aimed at prosperity, while the hero, arriving from the mountain symbolises the outside. In Captain Lleshi, even though the ballists identify with the perpetrators, they stay away. Even Captain Lleshi, who is considered a hero of the time, is not fully accepted in society due to rumours that his brother killed innocent civilians along with the other ballists. He also does not come from the village but rather from a rich family of beys.

Within the good / bad, the hero and society stand out as good, and the villain as bad. This identifying contradiction is partly applicable to Captain Lleshi. At first, he does not want to give the piano to the music teacher. This shows the dilemma and class conflicts between his traditional past and the altruistic role he is expected to assume in the new communist collective society.

In the strong/weak binary, the hero and the villain represent the strong whilst society is weak. Ballists and partisans in this instance represent the powerful while society is presented as a group that constantly needs protection.

Throughout the film, at no juncture does society  appear in its collective form, except for a short moment, on the scene when through the loudspeakers we hear the news announcing that allegedly Ahmeti, Captain Lleshi’s brother, was executed by the state for treason. But even in that momentary image, the mass is not presented as an active subject, just a passive listener, everyone stays calm and no one reacts. This scene is in contrast to the last sequence of Isa Qosja’s film Keepers of the Fog (Rojet e Mjegullës). There, the collective scenes of the masses are shown from a distance, as well as the mobilisation of the masses as an active and conscious subject equipped and ready to fight political injustices as a precursor to change.

The final contrast of the oppositional identification is one of the most important ones present in Captain Lleshi. This is best achieved in its setting, in the city tavern in the centre of Prizren, in an effort to include all the different social, national and religious strata.

Here we find a strange scene that shows the image of a woman covered by a veil, sitting at a table, rocking a baby in the cradle among drunk men smoking and singing the most grandiloquent song in Captain Lleshi. We do not know if through this scene Mitrović wanted to present an Albanian, Turkish or Bosnian woman, nevertheless, the symbolism of the woman, with the veil and cradle, exhibits nothing but the long-standing, orientalist discourse that the problem with high birth rates in Kosovo lies in the practices of “religious backwardness”. I do not believe that Mitrović could be so careless as tomake this very well prepared scene, for the purposes of spectacle alone.

We have a black-haired tavern singer, Lola, who most likely serves to symbolise the Roma woman. I infer such, referring to the actress’ earlier role in the film The Roma Woman (Ciganka), and given the general Western template where singers, waitresses and entertainers are in most cases Indigenous Americans or Latin American. As a Roma woman, she represents a more disadvantaged societal stratum than the other woman featured in the film, the blonde teacher at the school of music, for example. While the teacher presents the prototype of a moral woman, Lola symbolises an empty-minded woman that Captain Lleshi may treat as a sexual object.

The only category that is missing in Mitrović’s imaginary social structural stratification are undoubtedly not the ballists, because they, like the others, identify with the feudal mindset. It is rather the music teacher who came from Belgrade to set up new cadres by teaching in Prizren. She symbolises the upper classes in the sense that she arrives from a civilised urban centre to educate and establish law and order in a ‘wild’ province like Kosovo. The educator from Belgrade is from the capital of a nation-state while all the others represent the categories of ‘nationality’, a term that has been among the most hotly contested topics Yugoslav literature—whether or the ‘nationalities’ are equally entitled to their citizenship. Captain Lleshi also tries to show the partisan war as a resistance born of urban areas, and not of the broader peasant masses.

In short, Mitrović’s Kosovo appears as a counter-productive place, forgotten by history, the tavern symbolises the only social institute, and that there is nothing but chatter and drunkenness in the city’s cafes for cultural activity.

What is also important in the structure of a classical Western is the functional dynamics of the structural narrative that develops in the plot. Wright identifies 16 functions of structural order:

1. The hero enters a social group. 

2. The hero is unknown to the society.

3. The hero is revealed to have an exceptional ability. 

4. The society recognises a difference between themselves and the hero; the hero is given a special status. 

5. The society does not completely accept the hero. 

6. There is a conflict of interest between the villains and the society. 

7. The villains are stronger than the society; the society is weak. 

8. There is a strong friendship or respect between the hero and a villain. 

9. The villains threaten the society.

10. The hero avoids involvement in the conflict. 

11. The villains endanger a friend of the hero. 

12. The hero fights the villains. 

13. The hero defeats the villain. 

14. The society is safe. 

15. The society accepts the hero. 

16. The hero loses or gives up his special status. (Wright, p. 49).

Here we will not stop to analyse the development and functional structural order of the subject of Captain Leshi, but we will briefly address one of its functions, namely point 11. Although at first glance, it may seem that Captain Lleshi does not have a friend that the ballists could pose a threat to, it is the Captain’s brother who is endangered by them. As one scene shows, while Captain Lleshi looks at a photo of his youth with his brother, he enters into nostalgic memories and searches for the reason for Ahmeti’s involvement with the gang. As such, he makes no attempt to shatter the gang because it poses a threat to the society, but does so to save his brother. In this respect, the message of the film is reactionary because its action is driven by individual, biological kinship and familial bond rather than by any larger ideal that implies sacrifice in the name of a wider interest of the people. 

Following the breakdown of Tito’s relationship with Stalin, Yugoslav cinema found itself in an unenviable position due to the cessation of financial aid. This caused the limitation of film productions and later provoked a reaction from artists and directors. With the ideological break-up from the USSR and the change of political course, Yugoslavia began to look to the West for an acceptable cinematic model that would be in line with official state goals. In contrast to European films that portrayed reality from a critical perspective, Yugoslavia turned to the entertainment model of American cinema. This cinematic style, in addition to attracting wide publics, was also useful in fortifying the ruling Yugoslav ideology.

The reorganisation of cinematographic policy, in parallel with the economic model of the socialist self-government, enabled the decentralisation of state cinematography in favour of small film houses to allow for free competition.

The system of market competition enabled the cinema houses to automatically violate the supervisory rules set by the state film commission.

Within this vacuum of cultural reforms, companies used the opportunity to invent more sensational and interesting script topics in order to attract as many spectators as possible. Undoubtedly, historical-nationalist themes were among them.

One such example of this trend are the films of Mitrović.

Mitrović has been criticised in Yugoslavia for the nationalist tendencies in two other films, such as those in Thunderous Mountains (Nevesinjska Pushka), which tells the story of a Serb-led uprising in 1875, against the Ottoman Empire, and The March on the Drina (Mars na Drinu), about the Battle of Cer against the Austrians during the First World War.

One of Wright’s central theses is that “the narrative structure must reflect the social relationship necessitated by the basic institutions within which they live. As the institutions change […], so the narrative of structure of the myth must change.” (Wright, p. 186)

As such, the film Captain Lleshi excels in reflecting the then economic and social institutions, as well as the hidden political tensions of the late 50s, as in most cases, the films made at the time talk more about the time when they were made than about the time they refer to.

^[1]   For more information on Kosovar cinematography, read the text by Petrit Imami ‘Film in Kosovo after the Second World War’ (Film u Kosovu Posle Drugog Svetskog Rata), and ‘The History of Cinematography and Television in Kosovo’ by Shukri Kaçanik.

^[2]http://www.zemrashqiptare.net/news/15403/arben-xhaferri-kapiten-leshi-ose-modelimi-i-shqiptarit-te-pranueshem.html

^[3]  Will Wright, Six Guns and Society: A Structural Study of the Western (Los Angeles: University of California Press. 1975), 185.

Let us look more closely at some of the statistics here. Pietro Germi’s drama film The Railroad Man was screened nine times, totaling the attendance of 4389 people. Another great classic, Mikhail Kalatozov’s The Cranes are Flying was also screened nine times, in front of 4433 people. On the other hand, King Vidor’s American Western, Man Without a Star, was screened twelve times with an attendance of 8133 people. However, the most watched film, perhaps somewhat surprisingly, was the orientalist comedy of Gregory Ratoff, Abdulla the Great. The film was screened fourteen times in which 9118 people came to watch it. 

In the end of his article, Mekuli points out that Prishtina, with its growing population, needed more than one cinema, and that the new cinema that had recently opened could not meet the needs of its public with its old equipment and narrow hall. He does not name this new cinema hall, however, according to the Rilindja archives, on 25th of May 1959 a new cinema called Vllaznimi was opened in Prishtina. Kino Vllaznimi was the second cinema of the city after Kino Rinia, and it was inaugurated with a presentation of Edmund Goulding’s classic film, Grand Hotel. During the 1950s, the inadequacies of the cinema halls in Prishtina was a frequent topic of discussion. Alongside Mekuli’s article, we present a short inquiry into the question of the need for a new cinema in Prishtina, which was published on 8th of February 1958, in Rilindja. 

In his text, Seyfullah describes one of their first actions as a group, which was the building of an illegal printing press for the reproduction of leaflets and pamphlets. In the terminology of the activists, this was referred to as setting up the “technique” or “device”. The action consisted of securing a location for the Gestetner (a duplicating machine), mounting it, translating leaflets, reproducing them, dismantling the Gestetner once more, and hiding it in parts. The Gestetner was a stencil-method duplicator that used a thin sheet of paper coated with wax; at the beginning of the forties, it was considered amongst the most dangerous of devices, and every communist worth his salt had to know how to operate it. To prevent discovery, the heavy device often had to be unmounted and remounted in a new place; a task which similarly implied an amount of risk due to its bulk. Seyfullah recounts a formidable story about hiding pieces of the Gestetner under the tomb of the Yesil Baba mausoleum; a place surely no one would think to look. Due to the solidarity expressed by local dervishes, the communists’ printing device was hidden in some of the most sacred spaces for the Muslim population in Skopje. In 1942, after he had joined the Partisans, Seyfullah came secretly to Skopje — as the only one who knew the whereabouts — to collect the letters and parts from under the Yesil Baba tomb, from which a new printing press was constructed in the woods.

The initial activities of Seyfullah and the others, were performed under the umbrella of the legal organisation “Yardım” (Help), a youth-led humanist organisation with leftist leanings, which was especially engaged in encouraging the development of a workers’ culture through theatres, free libraries, and sport. In a roundtable discussion with the original members of the Muslim Cell, organised by the Birlik and Flaka e Vllaznimit newspapers in 1959, one can read more about these activities, including their translations of Nazim Hikmet (into Albanian and into the spoken Turkish of those living in Skopje), popular comedies directed against corrupt Muslim bureaucrats, sports competitions, and numerous camps (kir gezintisi) in the nature. The Turkish transcript of this conversation was made by Şükrü Ramo and can be read under the title ‘Üsküp Müslüman Parti Birliği/Skopje Muslim Party Unity’, in Birlik, 15 July 1959. 

The objective for forming the Muslim Cell was not based on the politics of identity, as Seyfullah and Karahasan emphasise in the aforementioned discussion; they never felt like an “ethnic” addition to the pan-Yugoslav anti-fascist and internationalist uprising. They were an equal part of the international movement. They aimed to mobilise Albanian and Turkish speaking populations against oppressive structures in Macedonia and Kosovo, including those of Serbian colonisers, Bulgarian occupations, encroaching Italian and German fascists, and the local feudal collaborators. It was a tiny cell, initially with just eleven members, all organically connected in what Antonio Gramsci would have called a “molecule”; or, the first molecule of a new form, a new organisation. That was the role of the Muslim Cell, a catalyst for broader change. And, when the right time approached they disbanded by joining other Partisan guerilla units and moving deeper underground. 

The “cell” was Kemal Seyfullah’s platform; his individual trajectory is evidence of the expansion of this molecule to a new form of socialist hegemony. Seyfullah, twice wounded and imprisoned during the war, became a high-ranking Partisan by the end of the Second World War, the Mayor of Skopje from 1951 to 1954, a member of the Central Committee, the Yugoslavian ambassador to Zambia and Botswana, and a board member of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Skopje in the sixties. He was an avid collector of contemporary art, an internationally active communist, translator, writer, and the biography of Seyfullah is yet to be written. The only document available today about Seyfullah is a small extract from Füruzan’s Balkan reportage in which she interviews Kemal’s brother, Lütfü Seyfullah. Lütfü tells her about the adventures of his brother, Tito’s attachment to him, visiting him in Zambia, his purchase of a Picasso for the Museum of Contemporary Art, his support for Milovan Djilas, a temporary dissent from communist institutions, his theoretical writings and anti-bureaucratic life, his distaste for  nationalism, and so forth. Lütfü concludes the interview by remarking that it was “good [Kemal] didn’t [live to see] these days” (Füruzan, Balkan Yolcusu, Yapi Kredi Yayinlari, 1996). 

Both Lütfü’s recollections, and Füruzan’s commentary have to be taken with a pinch of salt. What can be recommended though, are the writings of Kemal Seyfullah himself, which mostly deal with questions of nation. A collection of his writings on nationalism was published in 1972 as Ulusallık Sorunu (The National Question, Sesler, Skopje, 1972); they offer a conceptual framework for the discussion of nationalism in relation to international politics, and most importantly, develop from perspectives of class, gender, and cultural emancipation. The chapters — each published as separate essays in the journal Sesler — address this theory from several angles: ‘The National Question Today’ (originally published in the first issue of Sesler in 1965), is the opening text, and sets the terms of discussion with the national question as a contemporary problematic, and thus a problematic within socialism, ‘The Economic Relation between Nations and Nationalities’, ‘International Relations and the Question of Culture’, ‘Lenin on the National Question’, etc. Seyfullah also wrote more technical reports on the national question, including the ‘Yugoslav Communist League and National Minorities’ (Savez Komunista Jugoslavije i Nacionalno Pitanje, Kultura, Belgrade, 1959); and ‘The National Minorities in the Socialist Republic of Macedonia’, translated into both English and French (‘Jugoslavia’, Belgrade, 1965). 

These books, reports, and analyses became the core theoretical and institutional documents forming the Turkish speaking national ideologies during socialism in Yugoslavia. In following months we will critically engage with these materials, and propose a new narrative for the complexities of Turkish and other national formations in Kosovo and Macedonia during the socialist period. 

In this playlist you will have access to pieces by many composers and interpreters such as Encuentro Sanz, Santa Cruz, Christophe Rousset, David Zinman, Berliner Philharmoniker, Oslo Philharmonic Orchestra, John Cage. Besides the curated music, Petrit Çeku has also shared his thoughts and intentions in the paragraph below:

“Hello Lumbardhi! My name is Petrit Çeku. I am honoured to be closing this musical cycle, which leaves its discrete traces of musical activity in Prizren during 2020 and I am glad to have the opportunity to share something with you in these times of  pandemic. As someone who comes from the world of classical music, I wish to present you with some pieces from that world. I hope that by the end of this playlist you will realise that this is not “serious music”, as it is wrongly called in many countries, nor is it classical, as it is called around the world. This music is essentially inspired by the musical creators’ curiosity for the movements of two or more notes in opposite directions, which was later refined into a science-like discipline called counterpoint, or note against note.” 

Sezgin depicts a curious period of Lumbardhi Cinema. The scene takes place in what is now known as the green room for meetings, which used to be a buffet, later turned into a café-bar where the carefully studied characters within the article — some of whom worked at the cinema — used to hang out every evening for many years until the property of the cinema became a contested site, with the intention that it would be turned into a parking lot. 

More than just nostalgic writing, this is documentation of the heretofore invisible people, who took care of the cinema and were the living archives of decades of Lumbardhi’s internal, day-to-day operation. What Sezgin calls ‘the provincial modernism’ of this group of elderly men, to differentiate from a more classist approach, was in fact a group of outcasts in whom Sezgin and his friends found a mirror for how they perceived themselves in Prizren.

The derogatory term ‘qyli’ (the peasants, the villagers) used here to point out the savage attitude towards the cinema more so than to make a distinction from the ‘kasabali’ (the citizens, the civilized) is deeply ingrained in Prizren’s mentality, luckily vanishing slowly as a more nuanced understanding of both is coming to surface. The writing is filled with descriptions of local characters and characteristic elements which bring it closer to the literary genre of nonfiction. ‘Taksirat party’ is a rich document of a specific period of Lumbardhi that we are glad to have at hand in such vivid colors.

TAKSIRAT PARTY 

Dedicated to Babo and Gjabir

This is a sociological and anthropological story about a very interesting community in Prizren, which will soon disappear. I will not narrate it in an academic way, since there is not space here to contain the specificities and peculiarities of the case. This is a story about people, all of them well beyond their 60s, who regularly gathered at the buffet of the Prizren cinema to discuss everything there was to discuss regarding Prizren, Kosovo, the wider world, and other things. I, along with my friends, first met them at Dokufest in 2004, having fun with their big, cheap, cold beers in Nikšićko bottles. These beers were the reason we quarrelled with some people, and were the reason we created and distributed a zine, Valdrin Prenkaj and I named “Fantazin”, which will forever be remembered as the little scandal of the festival, and as a very interesting experiment from the underground. But this is a different story. 

Half a litre of cold, 50cent Nikšićko beer was reason enough for us to start bothering the elders of the cinema buffet. At the time, Montenegro was not yet an independent country, and the Nikšićko beer could not be found anywhere else. To put it in colloquial terms, at the time, Nikšićko beer was not considered a politically correct beer in other bars. We were intrigued, how this beer was here and who were these people drinking it? When we started going back to the cinema buffet, even after Dokufest, the only reason was to warm ourselves up before hitting the city and the nightclubs. But more and more, we started thinking of the buffet as an attractive prospect to the clubs which, for us, were increasingly transforming into very boring and conservative spaces, where people had fun for the hundred-thousandth time to the idiotic sounds of the Red Hot Chili Peppers or Depeche Mode, sometimes Nick Cave. The passivity of repetition started to become unbearable, and so we slowly began staying at the buffet all evening, and would go straight home after, not into the city as before. Thereupon the buffet became our only underground nightlife. 

I feel it is now my obligation to clarify to the reader as to why the cinema became so important to us. Naturally, the Nikšićko beer was not reason alone, the main reason was these older people we encountered, the informal group called Taksirat Party or the Party of Taksiratlis, the Party of the Wretched, who each and every night talked over beer, cards and dedikodi (gossip). Their stories were full of interesting anecdotes, their irony and lively jokes, shameless, and the endless talks were truly the lifeblood of the city, as I and my friend who went there recall it. 

Now for a little anthropology. The Initiation. The Initiation into the Taksirat Party developed thus: At the beginning the Party would immediately familiarise the newcomer (in our case me, along with my friends) with their embodied knowledge of the city, so that the newcomer would become interested in details about this family she/he would come to belong to, how they function and where they live. If you were suited to their cartography of the city, they would call you kasabali and everything would be fine, you could join the gang. Kasabali meant, first of all, that you lived in the city, and second that your behaviour was befitting of a citizen, which meant not behaving as a qyli (a villager). Thereby, not to be stingy, to know how to have fun, to live, to love journeys, to know how to swim and how to eat well. Of course this reads as a petit-bourgeois philosophy, but in Prizren it can be something other, a provincial modernism. If any reader of the Pallanka Philosophy (provincial philosophy, in the words of Radomir Konstantinović) should come back with questions, the Party of the Wretched in the cinema would convince her/him of the veracity of that book, and would enable her/him to scientifically verify the anatomy of this provincial thought. According to the theory of the Party of the Wretched, it was not only important to live in the city, but to behave like a citizen, as I explained earlier. Hyshit lived in the city centre, but did not have a single quality befitting of citizenship by this rubric, and was therefore known as a villager. He was the least attractive in the whole Party. Boring like a villager. The rest of the members of the Party of the Wretched knew everything about the city. They knew with cadastral precision all of the (old) addresses and locations, all of the secrets held between families and an entire lexicon of untold stories. For us, most of these stories constituted a completely new experience of the city. 

The ritual. The stories would begin like this: Almost every night Valon would announce the recent death announcements in the city to the buffet crowd. Those in the Party, would scrutinise it in detail and tell Valon when and where the funeral would commence, and he would later join it, all the way to the cemetery, and eventually get money for it. This was his favourite hijink. Whilst for the Party this was a cause for some analysis, naturally the analysis of life and identity of the deceased. Valon was the true spectacle of the Party from the cinema. A disabled borderliner, he would not speak anywhere but in the cinema. There, he communicated everything with Gjabir, who was the only one who could understand his language (Valon’s vocabulary was in its entirety different from the rest, for every single thing he had his separate system of description. Whereas Gjabir, apart from the three official languages of Prizren, also spoke Romani, plus the language of Valon!). Valon had different names for everyone, Mongol, Ybe, Pope… He used to call me Rambo. Gjabir told us that a professor of defectology, some psychologist, was really astonished when he saw Valon able to speak at the cinema, since from the time of school he had been mute. 

Certainly there were other rituals and stories. The most intriguing were the stories told by the late Babo (or, The Motor). He had fought alongside the Italians against the Partisans, something that had soon become boring for him, but he had been able to learn Italian. The story of his trip to Malmo, Sweden, was interesting. He was constantly talking about the big bridge and the cabbage he had seen in a park there, and that he had been unable to take it with him (which made him feel somewhat badly). Babo was the head of the Party. The number one of the TNT band, as we called him. The whole Party was like Alan Ford. The other members of the Party were Gjabir (the manager), Haxhi Boza, Abdullah, Eran (the youngest member), Byka Tada and Hyshit. Of course, we were not members, but we had fun and we appreciated the ever present hospitality at the buffet, and the pleasure offered to us by this friendship, one now on the brink of extinction. 

I would not like to seem like some romantic, with my nostalgia and my conservative fatalism; as the intention of this text is something altogether different and has a different politics at its heart. This is a story entirely opposed to the foolish and deleterious decision to demolish the cinema, a decision that will destroy the largest cultural manifestation in Prizren (that is, Dokufest) and which has already destroyed the Party. This is a decision that could only be made by people whom the Party would deem worthy of the label “qyli” or “those who know nothing of the City, but only think of money”.  

Nota bene by Sezgin Boynik

The editors of the Lumbardhi blog recently asked me if they could reprint “Taksirat Partisi” as a document of the time, to which I agreed. It should be read as exactly that. Considering its prominent placement in the blog, I feel an obligation to add some further clarifications. 

Soon after it was initially published, I disowned the text and completely distanced myself from its arguments. Though not from its spirit. This text was written hastily; if I remember correctly, in a bar in the midst of all the commotion of Dokufest. It is the product of a combination of politics, punk and libido. Indeed, I wrote it, but it was a distillation of collective confusions, contradictions, and despairs that we all felt at that time. It was, if I remember correctly, 2006 or 2007. We were all depressed by the fact that this community of older people, living completely outside of the grasps of consumerism and neoliberalism, would soon disappear. And with them the whole cinema, and any other place which was no longer generating money. 

In the text, I wrongly accuse the “peasants” as being responsible for the plunder and pillage of such public institutions, and for the destruction of public space that occured after the arrival of the second millennium. This must be corrected; the privatisation, neoliberal plunder, wild urbanisation, and the illegal appropriations did not happen spontaneously, they were not the result of primitive kleptocracy, and it was not because of the insatiable greed of poor peasants. It was the outcome of well-organised parcelling, involving people with Master’s and Doctoral degrees, members of international construction boards, respectable and wealthy citizens. 

“Hello Lumbardhi, my name is Aine and I am a singer, composer and performing artist. It is my honour to present to you songs from Okinawa, Yayama and Amami, three regions from the Ryukyu Islands, south of Japan and north of the Philippines. The music in the region can be categorised broadly into two: the ritualistic songs which can be heard only in rituals — they are time and site specific, and belong to the oral culture of women. The second category, the Sanshin songs are played with Sanshin, a three string instrument and they represent the cultural ties to peace activities around the world”.

You can read more on the concept of ‘cinefication’ in Kinofigurimi’s first entry at BLLOGU.  Just three years before the publication of this text, the same author also published a short article called “Dinar — The almost crucial moment in the politics of Bistrica Cinema’s repertoire” in the Rilindja Newspaper, in which he criticised the profit-oriented management of Kino Bistrica. The arguments within this article are analysed in an upcoming book on Kino Bistrica’s history which was prepared within the context of Lumbardhi’s research programme ‘Kinofiguration’. 

Some of the musicians in this playlist, including Guillermina Ramirez Cova, Carmella Lilia Vera, Pedro Eustache, Ismael Querales, Ana Carmela and Gabriel Chakarji, take us through a musical adventure on Venezuelan culture. Below are a few words shared for Lumbardhi’s audience by Ana Carmela Ramirez:

“This is a compilation of music from Venezuela, made by Venezuelan people honoring the culture and the traditions that belong to this small but rich place in South America. You’ll experience different instruments like the Venezuelan Cuatro dhe Bandola Llanera. You’ll enjoy the beauty of Afro-Venezuelan culture and our indigenous people in the Amazon. This is a brief journey, from the past to the present of Venezuela and a shed of light on how musicians are evolving and bringing new ideas to our folklore.”