Shkumbin Istrefi

A sleepy Montenegrin village, where most of the natives have emigrated to the US, is the setting for a bitter-sweet tale of three women fighting for autonomy. Suta resists pressure to marry her late husband’s autistic twin, Vezire and Drane must learn to coexist as their mutual husband plans to leave, and Fize tries to find a bride for her son. A stork’s arrival troubles the superstitious villagers.

As their city is occupied by a new organized crime boss, three local gangsters decide to return from Mexico and fight him in a mouse and cat game.

Drin finds himself unchanged, aside from his experience, at the end of his existential crisis.

Story happens in the first days after NATO troops enter Kosova. After the signing of the military agreement in Kumanovo, in the house of the retarded, the guards and employees leave their places and flee. Inmates are all retarded but they have a special philosophy of life, they have their wishes and their dreams. Being free gives them a chance to make dreams come true, but they are confronted with a reality and environment, which in one way or another is very different. From the moment of getting out the fences, they are conflicted with people that call themselves free. Gradually this conflict roughens and with it degenerates the meaning of freedom. There are three main characters, Kukum, Mara and Hasan.

Set in an area between the Yugoslavia and Albanian border in the year 1968, an idealist teacher wants to cross the border to Albania, where he believes he will find a state of ideal communism.

Agron disappeared for years during the war, missing in action and presumed dead. When he suddenly re- turns home one night, his family are shocked: How will they tell the others about his return? Many projects have been undertaken in the village in the name of Agron’s ‘heroic death’. If he shows up alive it will create many problems for the beneficiaries of the project: his family is receiving financial help as the family of a martyr and has raised loans on the basis of this income. Now Agron has two choices: either to show up in public or to wait for the projects to end. A month passes and Agron is at home while a statue is being erected in the local schoolyard. He has made his decision...

The calm and ordinary life of a forgotten village is disturbed with the arrival of three prostitutes in the village’s bar, owned by two pimp brothers. The men, despite the efforts of their wives to stop them, spend all their time in the village’s bar, spending their last money on alcohol and sex. Chaos overcomes the village school; its devotees abandon the mosque. Only two youngsters benefit from all this mayhem, by realizing their love affair, forbidden by their parents. At the end, the women start upraising. Consequently, the bar is burnt down and the village looks that it will return to normality.

Syla, a tortured former political prisoner from Kosova, realizes that his political idealism destroyed his life. After twenty years of mundane life in London, he returns home to confront his troubled past.

A lonely boy, who lives in Amsterdam with his refugee mother from Kosovo, keeps getting into trouble while yearning for her acceptance. But the traumas caused by the war, which his mother hides away from him, turn his world upside down.