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The Prishtina International Film Festival has wrapped its 11th edition, which ran from 16-21 July and screened over 70 films, with an awards ceremony held at the National Theatre. The winner of the Balkan film competition at the 11th Prishtina International Film Festival, a strand also known as the “Honey and Blood” programme, was Albanian director Robert Budina’s feature A Shelter Among the Clouds, as decreed by jury members Karin Dix, Daniel Mulloy and Eponine Momenceau. Furthermore, the film’s leading actors, who both originate from Kosovo, Arben Bajraktaraj and Irena Cahani, snagged the Best Actor and Best Actress Awards, respectively. The jury bestowed the Best Director Award upon Turkey’s Mahmut Fazıl Coşkun for his film The Announcement, which also picked up the Fipresci Jury Award. The international jury for PriFest’s European competition, comprising Claudia Landsberger, Armond Morina and Vladimir Anastasov, handed first-time Slovenian director-screenwriter Darko Štante’s Consequences.

Turkish film ‘The Announcement’ picked up two awards.

Robert Budina’s mountain-set family drama A Shelter Among The Clouds was the key winner at Kosovo’s PriFest in Pristina on Sunday (July 21), taking home three prizes including the best Balkan film award.

The Albania-Romania co-production also received the best actor and actress prizes for Kosovan actors Arben Bajraktari and Irena Cahani respectively.

It centres on the religious divisions between an extended family in an Albanian mountain community.

The film premiered at Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival in Estonia in November 2018, where Screen’s review described it as “visually arresting…evocatively...

Kosovo, the tiny former Serbian region that won independence in 2008 after a decade of bitter and violent ethnic clashes, has for the first time nominated a film for the Academy Awards. Isa Qosja'sThree Windows and a Hanging, which premiered at the Sarajevo Film Festival last month where it won the Cineuropa Award, uses the background of the havoc wreaked in lives by war to probe tradition and gender roles in ancient European Muslim society. The film is set in a deeply traditional village a year after the Kosovo War of 1999, where school teacher Lushe (Irena Cahani) reveals to

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