New York Film and Video Festival

Sunday, May 7th Screen 2 Village East Cinemas
12:05 pm Seen Objects 19 min
Genre: Experimental/Narrative
Director: Brian Schimpf

Synopsis: A story about a young woman doing research on going blind. The movie is visually interwoven with graffiti. Both a narrative and a chronicle of a once underground art form.

The Steinway Mansion 51 min
Genre: Documentary
Director:James Sabastian

Synopsis: landmark Steinway mansion is up for sale, and may fall into the wrong hands. It is the last of the standing mansions on the East River in Queens, and has historic importance. The current owner shows us the inside and talks about it's history especially with the Steinway and Sons Piano Company.TBA
2:05 pm Eye of the father. Eye of the son.
12:54

Genre: Documentary - Essay

Director:Carl Valiquet
Synopsis: . In 1950 , Jean-Victor Valiquet left his wife and his two children to go and work in Nitchequon, a weather station in northern Quebec. On his spare time, he took photographs of the local Cree Indians. 54 years later, Carl Valiquet, now a photographer, finds some of the children that appeared on his father¹s photographs.In 2004, the son leaves on a journey that would take him in his father¹s footsteps.


Tears' Icon
31 min

Genre: Documentary

Director:ILIR KABASHI
Synopsis: Ferdane Çerkezi from Gjakova (KOSOVA) has four sons and her husband missing. She lives alone. Despite the fact that the sorpses of the dead are being brought back from Serbia on daily basis, she still hopes that her husband and sons will return alive. She cleans their shoes every day, and speaks with their pictures every morning.
The film is winner of two prizes:"ONE WORLD 2005" Festival, in Prishtina - The Jury Prize & The Public Prize

The Children of Cabra 55 min
Genre: Documentary
Director:Eki Rrahmani
Synopsis: In March of 2004, three children drowned in the river Iber in the small village of Cabra, Kosovo. A further 19 people were killed, 900 injured and 5000 displaced, In this film Eki Rrahmani returns to the small, yet remarkable village, at the heart of the conflict to meet the families of the children who died. This film looks beyond the headlines of tragedy to document the simple lives of people confronted in the harshest way by political events.

4:05 pm


Desole


5:15

Genre: Experimental Drama

Director:Shawn Willis
Synopsis: A troubled man stands alone in the world. As he runs from his fears of infidelity, he finds desolation inevitable.

and fate.

Rampage of the mafia may delay Kosovo independence - Sunday Times - Times Online

Rampage of the mafia may delay Kosovo independence
Tom Walker, Pristina

KOSOVO, the former Yugoslav province, is falling into the grip of Albanian organised crime gangs, casting a shadow over attempts by the international community to turn it into a fully fledged independent state by the end of this year.

Participants in talks in Vienna, sponsored by the United Nations, on the “final status” of Kosovo, are concerned that the mafia networks that smuggled guns into the disputed province from Albania in 1997 and 1998 are using the same channels for a burgeoning trade in illicit petrol, cigarettes and cement. Prostitution and drugs are also popular staples of the black economy.

The profits are ploughed into shopping centres and hotels, which are going up as part of a building boom in the province. Petrol stations are especially popular — there are more than 2,000 of them catering for a population of 2m in a territory the size of Devon. Many are believed to be part of a money laundering racket, controlled by a few of the largest clan families, involving oil smuggled in from Montenegro.

Despite attempts by Soren Jessen-Petersen, head of the UN mission in Kosovo, to downplay the extent of the problem, UN officials admit the corruption extends deep into the heart of the Kosovo government.

“Crime groups have been able to operate with impunity,” said Marek Antoni Nowicki, Poland’s leading human rights lawyer and the UN’s international ombudsman for Kosovo until last year.

“You have a criminal state in real power — it needs underground illegal structures to supply it with everything to survive. These networks can rely on the weakness of the public institutions to sanction their operations.”

On Friday the UN’s internal watchdog, the Office of Internal Oversight, accused Jessen-Petersen of turning a blind eye to widespread fraud at Pristina airport. He protested that the accusation was “entirely unwarranted”.

Kosovo is still technically part of Serbia: Vojislav Kostunica, the Serbian prime minister, argues that Belgrade must retain some form of control.

The fight against corruption is complicated by the fact that the task is shared between different bodies of varying degrees of competence.

“The aim is to keep the criminals under control,” said Nowicki. “The question is can the international community do it? It is very doubtful.”

Mob-rule Kosovo risks partition - Sunday Times - Times Online

The Sunday Times March 21, 2004

Mob-rule Kosovo risks partition
Erich Rathfelder, Kosovo Polje and Tom Walker

SUPPORT was growing this weekend for radical proposals to partition the troubled province of Kosovo after a week of rioting and ethnic cleansing in which at least 28 people have died.

The arrival of 700 British troops and thousands more from other Nato countries yesterday appeared to have stopped the rampaging Albanian mobs, but their presence came too late for many Serbian families.

While condemning the cleansing, most diplomats concede that Kosovo’s final status — either remaining a province of Serbia or becoming an independent country — has to be resolved urgently for any chance of lasting peace.

Without any internationally imposed solution, both sides are likely to push for drastic action. Boris Tadic, the defence minister of the Serbia-Montenegro federation, has warned that if Nato could not protect the Serbian minority, then the Serbia-Montenegro army would.

“Both sides are trying to show how tough they are — it’s a bit like the Greeks and Turks on steroids,” said one worried diplomat.

The week’s violence — which began when two ethnic Albanian children drowned in the Ibar river, which cuts through the divided city of Mitrovica, while apparently being pursued by Serbs — has revealed what diplomats admit are glaring inconsistencies in international policy in the Balkans.

In Bosnia, Serbs and Muslim Bosniaks are kept divided — and the Serbs are effectively given their own mini-state in Republika Srpska — but in Kosovo the Serbs are told their only future is to live with the majority Albanian population.

Vojislav Kostunica, the Serbian prime minister, has repeatedly told the United Nations administration running Kosovo that the formula cannot work, and demanded that the Serbs be given their own territory within Kosovo.

By contrast, the Albanians, under the leadership of Bajram Rexhepi, the Kosovan prime minister, reject any such territorial concession to the Serbs and are pressing for the province to become an independent country within its present borders.

Matters are further complicated by the fact that the most important shrines of the Serbian orthodox church in Kosovo are in areas near the Albanian border which are now, in ethnic terms, purely Albanian.

“The silver lining, sad as it is, is that this week’s events should peel the scales back from the eyes of some people who have simply never understood Kosovo,” said another diplomat with 20 years’ experience in the province. “They have never had a multi-ethnic society and they never will.

“I personally think the planners will sit down and confront the reality, and that is you have to forget about Serbs living in fortified enclaves. De facto, we are looking at partition.”

Under one plan for partition, Mitrovica and its surrounding areas, which border Serbia proper, could be joined to it. Serbian enclaves within a Kosovo Albanian state could be created around the central monastery of Gracanica, and the eastern town of Gnjilane. A string of mountain villages in the south, bordering Macedonia and including the ski resort of Brezovica, could also remain predominantly Serbian.

A long-term solution for the medieval Serbian monasteries in the western towns of Pec and Decane, close to the anarchic lands of northern Albania, could be to protect them as world heritage sites, guarded by international troops.

While committees pored over maps in far away capitals, on the ground in Kosovo life was grim this weekend for the hundreds of Serbian families who will probably never return home. Among the towns that may have been cleansed for ever is Kosovo Polje, on the outskirts of Pristina, the capital.

Twenty Serbian houses were burnt on Thursday night, after they had been looted. The new United Nations-trained Kosovo police force — which is almost totally Albanian — did little to stop the mob.

The overwhelming majority of the 28 people who died were Serbs, although at least six Albanians were killed during rioting in Mitrovica. A French peacekeeper also died and dozens more international soldiers and police were among the 600 wounded. In all, hundreds of Serbs have been left homeless, and a Serbian population already reduced to 100,000 looks likely to shrink further.

“Local police did not interfere in this systematically organised event,” said one of the displaced Serbs, now sheltering in a base of the Nato-led Kosovo force. “What you see is ethnic cleansing.”

Yesterday many houses were still smouldering, along with a newly built school that the UN had hoped would encourage the Serbs to stay.

In Pristina, itself, none of the new generation of Albanian politicians was prepared to condemn the cleansing directly. Other Albanian leaders, such as Bujar Bukoshi, the former prime minister of the Albanian underground state that existed under Slobodan Milosevic, the Serbian leader indicted for war crimes in Kosovo, said he was “shocked by such criminal acts”.

One planner in the Balkans claimed that the genie of Albanian nationalism, released by the 1998 war against Milosevic, would prove unstoppable. His recommendation for Kosovo was simple: “Split it, cordon it off and pray to God,” he said.