23 May Program of the sixth “Mirëdita, dobar dan!” festival

The festival “Mirëdita, dobar dan!”, a unique event that has been presenting the Kosovo cultural and social scene to the Belgrade audience since 2014, will be held this year from May 29 until June 1.

With the presentation of artists and performers, representatives of the modern Kosovo cultural scene, the goal of the festival is to initiate changes and create a tradition of cooperation through the meetings of the Serbian and Kosovo social and cultural communities, which will contribute to the permanent normalization of relations between Belgrade and Pristina.

This year, the festival will be officially opened on May 29 at 7 p.m. in the Center for Cultural Decontamination, after which the audience will have the opportunity to check out and participate in the exhibition “Let’s make love” through which the author, Shkumbin Tafilaj, wants to send an invitation to the public to say “no” to hate speech.

At 8:00 p.m., the film “Cold November” directed by Ismet Sijarina will be shown, a film which takes place in the period when the disintegration of Yugoslavia is in full swing, when Yugoslav President Slobodan Milošević is trying to reduce Kosovo’s autonomy within Yugoslavia and when the Albanian population in Kosovo is exposed to strong pressures in state and educational institutions.

The second day of the festival “Mirëdita, good day!” will be dedicated to the issue of the missing people. On Thursday, May 30, from 6:00 p.m., a debate and promotion of the book “Living with the Memory of the Missing” will be organized in “Dorćol Square”, which talks about persons who have been missing since the war in Kosovo and people who are still searching for the missing. After the discussion and promotion of the book, the documentary film “Ferdonia” will be shown about mothers from Kosovo who have been searching for their family members for almost 2 decades, who disappeared during the Kosovo war.

On the third day of the festival, May 31, a collection of selected plays by Albanian writers from Kosovo “Flight over the Kosovo Theater” will be presented – a collection of works created in the period from the NATO bombing to the declaration of Kosovo’s independence in 2008. The program of the third day of the festival will continue with the performance of “Balkan Creoles”, a play by Enver Petrovci about children born in marriages of parents of different nationalities. The play is about children who, during the former Yugoslavia, were brought up without a strong nationalist charge, which is why they were marked by society as suspicious and undesirable because they did not take sides during the wars.

On the last day of the festival, the audience will be presented with the publication “History of Kosovo in the school textbooks of Kosovo, Albania, Serbia, Montenegro and Macedonia” by Shkelzen Gashi, which discusses the way certain historical moments are presented and the differences in their presentation in the school textbooks of neighboring countries.

The festival will be closed with a musical program, a performance by the band from Djakovica “Don’t listen to your neighbors”, which brings a combination of traditional Albanian and folk songs in a modern style, and a performance by DJ Matala, a producer from Pristina.

The “Mirëdita, dobar dan!” festival is being held this year at a specific moment, when relations between Belgrade and Pristina are at their lowest point since the beginning of the Brussels negotiations. The crisis in the political dialogue is very clearly and directly reflected in the daily life of the citizens of Serbia and Kosovo, and further discourages the rare examples of cooperation between the two societies, not only in culture, but also in the economy, sports, education and all other areas. The festival clearly sends a message to the Serbian and to the Kosovo public, but also to the political elites, that barriers and obstacles must be removed, not new ones created.

Details about event locations and timetables are available on the festival’s website, and admission to all events is free again this year.

The festival is organized by the Youth Initiative for Human Rights and Civic Initiatives from Belgrade and Integra from Pristina.

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