THE KUKUM / IN PRODUCTION FROM KOSOVAFILM

The story happens in the first couple of days after NATO troops enter Kosovo. After the signing of the military agreement in Kumanovo, the uniformed Serb guards, placed at the institution for mentally challenged people, leave their posts and flee. Everyone who worked in this institution joined them, leaving the patients alone without any supervision. Being free give them a chance to make dreams come true, but they are confronted with a reality and environment, which is very different in one way or another. From the moment of getting out of the fences, they are conflicted with the people that call themselves free. Gradually this conflict roughens and with it degenerates the meaning of freedom. There are three main characters, Kukum, Mara and Hasan. They also move out from institution and split up from the crowd. They go through their own vicissitudes that makes the essence of the story. Every one of them has their own dreams, plans and visions for freedom. They try to incorporate it in this new environment. But there are a lot of obstacles… Freedom is not what they imagined. Nobody accepts them.

"When NATO intervented Kosovo and after the war was over, Kosovo became free. Everyone was thinking that freedom makes possible for us to do everything we want, going to any place that comes to your mind, in other words being free. I thought people who have suffered violence and abuse by the machinery of a notorious regime would have more understanding for every human being, every situation… But what really happened?! Instead, they became cruel, loosing their sympathy, dehumanizing and manifesting freedom by denying it to the others…a strange kind of freedom. The film is a metaphor of freedomand postwar people; those who suspiciously observed everything and the others who need only a bit of this freedom. Three persons, let them call mental patients, wish to meet people, to love each other, to make love, travel by train, smoke… They meet obstacles in fulfilling these very human needs. While some people make fun of them, the others suspect that their village might become insane by “their insanity”. The free space of these characters becomes narrower while their desire faints. Ultimately, they don’t get understood, but they get abused and chased all the time with no mercy."

Isa Qosja