It’s 10pm on a balmy moonlit evening and 200 pairs of eyes are gazing at a cinema screen perched on the banks of a river. Above us, where an uplit castle stands majestic on the hillside, another audience is captivated by the flickering images projected on to its ancient walls. Further along the promenade, packed pavement cafes buzz with chatter while the call to prayer echoes from Ottoman-era mosques.
It feels romantic, peaceful. But there is also a curious undercurrent. For one thing, the film we are watching isn’t some Hollywood blockbuster, but the documentary Dirty Wars, a hard-hitting piece of reportage about US counter-terrorism attacks in the Yemen. And for another, this isn’t your standard summer tourist haunt. It’s Kosovo – a place that has experienced more conflict in the past 15 years than most of Europe has seen in generations.
But this is the point of Dokufest. This annual documentary film festival in the pretty medieval town of Prizren, at the base of the Sharr mountains, makes a point of tackling tough issues. The festival’s creative director, Veton Nurkollari, tells me: “I always want to challenge the audience, which sometimes means reminding them how terrible war is. Because if people forget, it can happen again.”
The festival is now in its 13th year, and will see 10,000 tickets sold for 250 films shown in nine venues over one hot week. Its growing reputation attracts filmmakers from all over the world. And because the programme features mainly English-language or English-subtitled movies, approximately a quarter of festival visitors are international, with audiences bringing an estimated €3m to Kosovo’s struggling economy.
“Twenty years ago, Prizren was Kosovo’s cultural capital, and it was very normal for us to go to a film,” says Veton. “And then, in 1999, the war happened. We just thought that if we put on some screenings, it might trigger someone to restart the cinema.”
In 2002, Veton and his friends put on three days of movies in the disused shell of the open-air Kino Lumbargi cinema; they chose documentaries for the simple reason that they were easier to get hold of than US blockbusters. On the first night, torrential rain flooded the roads, but still the cinema was half full. On the second night, it was sold out. On the third, the last film closed to a standing ovation. Movie-going was back from the dead.
What marks Dokufest out from the rest of the international documentary scene, however, isn’t that it’s in Kosovo. It’s in its pop-up approach. Prizren hasn’t had a working cinema since before the war. So the festival organisers had to improvise, creating makeshift movie theatres by fixing screens to an assortment of unusual surfaces, from the walls of the Byzantine fortress to the inner caverns of a disused Turkish hammam.
The result is that cinema and city merge to create something magical. The sun goes down, the projectors fire up, and hundreds of people fall silent with a beer in hand and a cool breeze on their skin. When the movie finishes, the audiences join Prizren’s late-night throngs pulsing to techno beats in the packed-out bars before heading to one of Dokufest’s late-night gigs. It’s intellectual arts meets Balkan street party.
Which isn’t to say that the festival, and indeed the town of Prizren, is solely about nocturnal pursuits. Centred on Shadervan square on the south bank of the shallow Bistrica river, the old town’s pleasant hillside setting and Ottoman sites have long been a summer draw for Balkan families and the occasional western backpacker.
Prettier than the Kosovan capital Prishtina, Prizren, in the south of the country near the Albanian and Macedonian borders, has cobbled streets winding around the 400-year-old Sinan Pasha mosque and a Unesco-listed Serbian monastery. Tourists are becoming aware of its delights: the new Hotel Prizeni (see below) opened this year near Shadervan square, two more hotels are to follow in the next 12 months, and the lovely Hotel Cleon on the river bank has brought the town its first boutique-style lodging.
But with Dokufest, the old town gets an annual cultural facelift. A young crowd from France, Ireland, the US and, of course, Kosovo and Albania, make the trek up the hills to the ruins of the Dušan fortress, not to see the remains of what once marked the capital of the 13th-century Serbian empire, but to grab a bottle of Peja beer and watch an outdoor screening of Searching for Sugarman. And as well as joining the local Prizrenis in whiling away a hot afternoon in a promenade cafe, Dokufest invites visitors to take in a photo exhibition or participate in a series of daytime talks.
It’s when the heat dies down in the evening that the town really comes to life. Popular restaurants such as Ambient on the river and Ego on Shadervan square serve meze-style dishes and kebabs as well as the usual steaks, fish and pasta dishes, all in euro prices far lower than you’ll find in the west. Groups of teenagers and twentysomethings hang out on the Kej, the riverside promenade, where you can still see the cinema screens while chatting into the night. Red and green lasers from the Check Inn club illuminate the sides of the old mosque.
We push through the throngs, grab a Peja for a euro and join Veton and the Dokufest volunteers at Bar Aca (on Mimar Sinani), just one of the score of bars that have transitioned from their day-cafe selves. It’s packed, full of laughter and heated discussion on the next day’s programme. Soon, we’ll move on to the Dokunights stage, a short walk away, where a young crowd dance to DJs and Balkan bands until 5am, rolling to bed with the sunrise and doing it all again the next day.
It wasn’t what we’d expected from a trip to Kosovo. “People just really want to enjoy life,” says Veton. “Film and music – these things make that possible. If anyone says they can make a film that can change the world, that’s a big lie. But small changes, yes. Film can do that.”
• The trip was provided by Dokufest (dokufest.com), whose 2014 festival runs from 16-24 August. Air Germania (flygermania.de) flies from Gatwick to Pristina (90 minutes’ drive from Prizren) from €126 one way. Ryanair (ryanair.com) flies from Stansted to Podgorica, Montenegro, (three hours’ drive away) from £46 return. Hotel Cleon (+381 29 25888, hotelcleon.com) and Hotel Prizreni (+ 381 29 225200, hotelprizreni.com) both have doubles from €40 a night
