In a reflection on film art and historical memory, director Isa Qosja speaks about silence as the language of cinema and the lack of films about the Kosovo war. He analyzes the relationship between history, trauma and film aesthetics, emphasizing the role of cinema as a critical conscience of society.
DIRECTOR isa qosja is one of the most important figures of Albanian cinematography in Kosovo. With films that have left a deep mark on film culture, from hobnail and Guardians of the Mist te Cucumber and Three windows and a hanging, He has built an authorial style where atmosphere, symbolism, and reflection weigh more than dialogue.
In this interview for Telegrafi, Qosja talks about the great gap in films that deal with the Kosovo war, the complex relationship between historical fact and artistic interpretation, and the challenges of Kosovar cinema in the era of international festivals. He also emphasizes the need for a Kosovar neorealism that would make our film school more distinctive.
In the landscape of Albanian cinema, Isa Qosja remains an author who refuses noise to give voice to what often remains hidden beneath the surface of reality. Through this conversation, he soberly analyzes the relationship between documentation and creative freedom, arguing that true film is not content with imitating reality, but aims to build an artistic world where, as he himself says, "silence screams louder than dialogue."
When the image speaks louder than the dialogue
Mr. Qosja, in your films silence often weighs more than dialogue. Is this your way of understanding cinema as memory, reflection, or a form of resistance in the face of time?
I. The question: I want to start this conversation with a quote by Ingmar Bergman about Andrei Tarkovsky... Not by analogy, but to be clearer in answering your question. Bergman had stated: “While watching Tarkovsky’s film, I was shocked because I found myself on the threshold of a room, the key to which I had been looking for a long time. I had wanted to enter that room since the beginning of my career and I didn’t know how to enter..! Imagine..! Tarkovsky was already in that room and felt comfortable and safe..”
So, without wanting to hint at any comparison, I feel safer when I have silence in a film and not dialogue. Often dialogue is an explanation, it is information, while silence is a state. Then the early information quenches the viewer's curiosity. Today's viewer seeks a challenge, not information that would quench that challenge right there. Silence sometimes screams louder than dialogue, whether dramatic or informative.
Viewers love the language of gestures or the language of silence because they more spontaneously identify themselves within situations and characters. Another element that convinces me of the importance of silence is our mentality. We are in principle “smarter” when we are silent or, in other words, we give more accurate answers when we do not speak. The next factor that makes me weigh in favor of silence is myself. I always think that I feel more comfortable when I do not speak. I am silent and I see. I think. And all of this serves me as an argument, as a memory, as resistance in the face of time.
Cinema between history and conscience
In a country where history is still alive and sensitive, how much responsibility do you feel for cinema to be not only art, but also conscience?
I. The question: Cinema is always conscience. Or it should be conscience. Not only in times when history speaks loudly and clearly. The director, like any other creator, is always inclined to realize his art through reason, motivation and conscience. And this is indisputable. How much and how we can remain convincing in a scene where art and conscience confront historical facts is a complex issue.
I think this conditional relationship influences us to be less authors and more producers. There are two types of directors: those who imitate reality and those who create reality. Those who create reality are always more authors, more artistically powerful than those who imitate reality. Of course, history should neither be distorted nor ignored, but the fact that film, when it is not a document, is a dream, places us before the obligation of how to preserve the document and realize the dream.
The document is information, while the dream leads us to feelings, deep into the darkest spaces of the soul. Now that we have all this before us, we must react artistically, but also with conscience, to a cinematic work.
Do you see film as an emotional archive of a people or as a way to put collective memory in critical dialogue with itself?
I. The question: More like a collective memory in critical dialogue with ourselves. The emotional archive is inevitable, because it lives in our feelings. But critical dialogue places us before an innovative act for the emotional archive. We are the ones who use the emotional archive as a starting point on the long journey towards an artistic world. And this starting point is sufficient to be coherent towards a new situation and towards that emotional archive.
After all, film is an exploration of feelings through the cinematic alphabet, not a repetition of feelings experienced, seen or copied. Many films have been imprinted in my memory for their content, for the way they communicate with the viewer, for the silence, for the ritual, for the photography, for the music. And all of these are a collective memory of a time or an event.
The power of film to remain in the collective memory is stronger than the powers that other arts have. Now whether the content of a film will be treated as an emotional archive or as a collective memory in critical dialogue, depends on the author. However, sometimes the emotional archive works better and sometimes the collective memory in critical dialogue with itself.
Why is there no film about the Kosovo war?
Even after two decades of freedom, a consolidated film about the Jasharis and a serious project about the war are missing. Is this aesthetic hesitation or ethical fear, and how can a representation be constructed that avoids monumental iconography without reducing the sacrifice to heroic spectacle?
I. The question: Correct. A film about the sacrificed Jashari family is missing, but a film about the war is also missing. One about the massacres is also missing, one about the exodus is also missing. Our brightest history is missing. Why?! If so far we have reflected the post-war period with cinematic skill, and I appreciate this, why did we leave the war behind?!
In my opinion, there are several reasons. The first: finances. Such a film is expensive because it requires many extras, many costumes, many sets, many props, many pyrotechnics. All of these are expensive. Such a film requires actors who, unfortunately, here in our country do not have much experience in the historical genre. So these are some basic conditions for such a film.
How can this issue be resolved? First, I think that a special fund for war films should be created at the Ministry of Culture. Why do I say at the ministry and not at the CCK? Because the various juries at the CCK, which are mainly composed of international members, would not gladly approve such a topic. We could establish what we call a “chamber of war scripts” at the CCK, but with a special jury. And when the finances are secured, then I think that several scriptwriters and even two directors who understand the purpose well and have inspiration for these contents should be brought together.
How do you conceive of the relationship between historical fact and filmic interpretation? Where should the historian stop and where should the director begin so that the narrative acquires an artistic dimension and not simply a documentary one?
I. The question: This question changes our approach to film in general. History should stop at the accurate documentation of an event. So it is the starting point itself, the impression, the motivation, the destiny. Based on these sufficient moments from the "contribution" of history, the screenwriter, the director and the other authors who are the architecture of a film project take on the role.
Only in this way, I think, can we achieve an Albanian “Braveheart” without the tendency to distort history, but also without the tendency to glorify the historical moment. It does not mean that for such a film we need 500 extras or 5000, but we can tell a war story through an individual or a family.
Kurosawa, for example, spends half an hour on the ritual of the army's rally, shooting the flags and their multitude, the costumes and the power expressed through colors, the weapons and types of weapons, the portraits of the warriors and the determination they reflect, the gallop of the knights in the parade, and much more that precedes a battle. So the battle remains history, but the rally ritual is art.
Is there a risk that collective memory will remain at a ceremonial level, passing from history to uncritical myth, and is it cinema's duty to challenge this process?
I. The question: Of course it exists. And I'm afraid of that. This requires seriousness and knowledge. Maturity and artistic objectivity. Art builds myths, but it also exposes myths.
I see in this context a broad conversation between artists from Kosovo and Albania. Maybe even from Bosnia. Precisely to approach this problem with prudence and distance.
I liked the approach of the famous director Theo Angelopoulos towards this challenge. He based his formula for this phenomenon on the “content-political-aesthetic” axis. And his approach has proven to be quite creative and effective. So I see the formulation of your question as an interesting thesis and it would be my preference for a cinematographic roundtable on this extremely important and absolutely necessary topic.
In "Guardians of the Fog," repression appears as an atmosphere. Do you think that today's society risks a different fog, more moral and cultural than political?
I. The question: The atmosphere competes in content and authorship more than a political or historical panorama. Especially in this film. I did not intend a declamation about a time that no one remembers, no one has experienced, no one fears its repetition.
I think that in this case, in this film, the destination as my goal for the given time stole a bit of my creativity or artistic texture. It was a time when clear messages had to be sent against Serbian repression. This was also our obligation.
However, this "fog" awakened many nationalist souls that were sleeping in the bosom of many Serbs convinced that we should not show this fog to the audience. They were convinced that we should forget this page of history on account of an artificial "coexistence". If I had reworked this film today, I would have posted it better with dramatic colors and cinematic light and shade without losing the ideological purpose. Does our society today risk another fog that is more moral than political? Yes. I am convinced that when we need clarification, we are inclined to create fogs. Unfortunately.
"Proka" remains a cornerstone of our cinematography. If we were to set it in contemporary Kosovo today, what would be its conflict with reality?
I. The question: I have the impression that the conflict of that time still has coherence, but now on a larger scale. Back then it was "Proka" against the evil, today it would be "Proka" against the evil.
Back then, there was a "Proka", but a real one, while today there are many who supposedly "become" "Proka", but are in fact on the opposite side of Proka.
Now in the time we live in, if we try to differentiate ourselves from others, we will face a kind of socio-punishment. The one who is worth does not pass through this site of differentiation from ourselves. The person who knows, wants or is worth, I have the impression that he is unnecessary in the circumstances we live in. I did not want this to happen, that is why "Proka" happened to me.
Freedom, trauma and the narrative of a society
“Kukumi” articulates the crisis of the subject in the face of freedom. Was our experience after 1999 a state where freedom produced more disorientation than collective meaning, and does this influence how we narrate war in film today?
I. The question: I will start with that motto for the liberators “Freedom has a name”. It would be good to keep this substance as a goal even in peace, always. But…?! When I started shooting the film “Kukumi”, as if I was afraid that we, in the race to grab that “piece” of freedom that rightfully belonged to us, began to grab other pieces and acquire limitless freedom by speeding towards illegitimate and inhuman goals.
This produced, as you say, collective disorientation. There was no refuge of freedom for those who celebrated freedom as a moment they had been waiting for their whole lives. For those who sacrificed. Where was the freedom that we loved and awaited so much after all that repression and centuries of anxiety?!
Someone who was locked behind the bars of terror, as soon as freedom dawned, failed to place the flag of freedom on his piece of survival. He returned behind the bars, appreciating personal freedom safer on a wooden bench there in the shelter of the psychologically ruined than in the disoriented environment. The freedom we won with so much sacrifice can, as if faded into peace. Why?
With “Three Windows and a Hanging” you dealt with trauma and collective silence. How is the representation of trauma constructed without turning into a visual spectacle, and is the lack of a film about the war an indication of a still incomplete elaboration?
I. The question: We are more of a nation of rituals, of collective voice, but also of collective silence in some cases. In the specific case of “Three Windows…” silence is a syndrome of stigmatization. I think that trauma works more convincingly by remaining silent and without being transformed into a visual spectacle.
From an artistic point of view, the fullness of a film work is not spectacle, but credibility. If trauma as collective silence and stigmatization are read as categories of self-punishment, then I am convinced that these speak loudly for an effective indication of a film about war.
However, based on the reality of the events from the war, I think that with the film we will never be able to be completely inside the hell of the war that happened here. It could be a handicap and insufficient elaboration of those events, but it could also be a determining factor in the time distance to be magically inspired by these events.
Authorial film versus politics and the market
In the age of information noise, how difficult is it to create meaningful silence and to protect the film from political or media instrumentalization?
I. The question: It is difficult, but not only because of the informational noise. Also because of political instrumentalization. Especially because of political instrumentalization. Our film, whatever it is, must be freed from the ordered "heppens". It must be freed from the daily agenda. It must be freed from media marketing.
We need to create independent film, authorial film that is not subject to daily politics. We have stories, we have narratives, we have high-level creators. I believe very much in our cinematic possibilities.
In this context, I cannot fail to mention Jim Jarmusch as an extraordinary author of independent and auteur films, of films with modest finances but with large commissions. I am convinced that under our gray sky of cinematography there is room for all colors and lights.
When classical censorship is replaced by market pressures, how is a director's courage measured today?
I. The question: It's easy to be brave in film today. We just need to know more about those who have left their authorial mark on the world's film industry.
The market is irrelevant to us. We are not a film industry. We should not think about the market, because it does not actually exist, not only here, but not even for European film.
The only profit from film is its artistic value. But not the value for one use. Value is the universal dimension of film. Value is the long life of a story through the magical photographs that film possesses as art.
Kosovar cinematography is being affirmed internationally. Are we building an authentic school of film thought or are we adapting to the aesthetics of festivals?
I. The question: We have proven that we have international competitive potential and this is very encouraging. But we also need to think about cinema marathons and solutions after we "expend" the current content.
For now, I would say that sometimes we adapt to the politics or "aesthetics" of festivals.
To build an authentic school, we must commit to an identifiable Kosovar neorealism. Our past, present, and unclear future make us think more about approaching neorealism as a school or film movement.
Silence behind the camera
Amidst the noise of the scenes and the weight of your themes, where does Isa Qosja find the peace and pure joy of creation?
I. The question: Lately I remember many moments of my "action" on set and I miss these moments immensely. I have shot a film almost every ten years. This made me start from the beginning every time and this is an emotionally attacking obstruction, a bad contributor to the art of film and my work as a director.
I'm desperate about this, because I can't blame anyone, not even myself. Absurd, isn't it?!
I hope to hear at least once more that familiar sound of the camera starting to work on the director's password "Action".
Have you ever been afraid of the moral weight of a topic and, in this filmic void about the war, what frame would you tell a student to start their story about Kosovo with?
I. The question: Yes, I have almost always been afraid of the weight of responsibility in every artistic and pedagogical work I have done. In fact, one of the reasons I don't go to the premieres of my projects is this fear.
While I would tell a student to start the framework of the story about Kosovo with a portrait of an old man emerging from the turbulent flow of a river, or with a pair of stairs that have no end and down which a child's feet descend.
When you want to disconnect for a while from the noise of time and the flood of information, what restores your creative energy the fastest?
I. The question: Fishing gives me a lot of energy for everything. A day spent by the river or lake stores energy for a month of creative work.
Fishing here in Kosovo is different from that in my hometown of Vuthaj, but in both cases I feel calm and in tune with the silence of the river or lake that brings peace and inspiration. /Telegraph/
