MARDHË
Taking a closer look at women’s experiences of war, Oral History Initiative in partnership with forumZFD Kosovo program, has produced a short animated film Mardhë.
Through our work we happen upon extraordinary storytellers. With each retelling of the past, our narrators write and rewrite their lives. When women talk about war they humanize those experiences and war becomes a sequence of ordinary life. In wanting to capture this, Oral History Initiative in continuity has been recording and collecting stories that revisit memories of the 1999 war.
Directed by Flaka Kokolli, the film follows Beti, a woman in her late forties, who together with her family, is deported by Serbian security forces from her home in the capital of Kosovo to the border village of Bllacë. With war breaking out in 1999, her story is stitched together as the world she knew disintegrates. The seemingly endless cycle of cruelty Beti endures on her journey to safe haven becomes a collective story of resilience.
The production of the short animated film Mardhë is supported by the BMZ and Municipality of Prishtina.