In Latest Award-Winning Kosovo Film, a Coming-of-Age Story

Norika Sefa traces her passion for making movies to her father's own habit of capturing family events on film when she was a child in Kosovo.

With an old 16 millimetre camera, "he filmed everything that happened at home - events, birthdays, simple things," she said. When he handed her the raw material, Sefa edited what she calls a "hybrid documentary" that won her a place studying filmmaking in Denmark in 2012, aged 17.

Almost a decade later, Sefa has just walked away with the Special Jury Award at the International Film Festival Rotterdam with her debut feature film 'Looking for Venera', another coup for Kosovo's blossoming film industry after Blerta Basholli's 'Hive' won three awards at Sundance Film Festival.

Sefa, like her father, turned her lens on three generations of a Kosovo Albanian family and the spiritual awakening of teenage Venera, chafing against her patriarchal surroundings and lack of privacy in the family's cramped home in the Kacanik area of southern Kosovo.

Meeting Dorina, who is slightly older, helps open her eyes.

"Everything around them feels like stagnation," Sefa told BIRN. But, "being together, everything around makes so much sense… They enable each other."

Roles set in stone

Actors during Looking for Venera shooting. Photo: Courtesy of the Director Norika Sefa

Born in the western region of Djakova/Djakovica, Sefa chose to set her film in a village in the southern Kacanik region on the main artery running to neighbouring North Macedonia because of its "special geography."

"It has plains but there are also mountains; it also has a river, so it has very beautiful natural resources," she said.

But Kacanik in the film is a place where roles are set in...