The Heartefact Fund is organizing the seventh HFestival from December 8 to 22, 2020, which will offer the public an overview of the artistic and educational activities that were conducted during the previous year. The festival will be held entirely in online format, where in addition to Heartefact’s recognizable programs, there will be numerous debates, a unique speed dating program and a DJ online party for the end of the festival.
The special focus of the festival is on reconciliation policies and positive practices in the relations between Kosovo and Serbia. The program will be opened on Tuesday, December 8, by the online debate “Where are we now? Sustainability of Policies between Kosovo and Serbia “, moderated by Ivan Vejvoda, Director of Europe’s Futures project and permanent member of the Vienna Institute of Social Sciences, with panelists Senad Sabović, former operating chief for the OSCE Mission in Kosovo, Donika Emini, Executive Director of CiviKos and BiEPAG member and Ivan Đurić, Executive Director of YIHR Serbia, will discuss models of cooperation and normalization processes between the two companies.
New talks on these topics will continue on Friday, at 6:15 pm on the online panel “Lessons from the Western Balkans”, which will be led by Sabina Ćudić, political scientist and member of the Federal Parliament of Bosnia and Herzegovina, Agon Malići, political analyst and founder of Sbunker, and Milan Antonijević, Executive Director of the Open Society Fund. The talk will be moderated by Mario Mazic, a PeaceNexus Foundation advisor and Obama Foundation inaugural stypendist. Parallel with this, Andrej Nosov, theater director, will bring his performative research “Srebrenica 25” to an end, as a result of the work of Heartefact’s team on marking the anniversary of the genocide in Srebrenica.
The festival program continues on Monday, December 14 at 5 pm, with an online promotion of Jeton Neziraj’s drama “Balkan Brothel”. Playwright Biljana Srbljanović will talk to the author about a text that leans on Aeschylus’ “Orestes” and reflects on war policies in the Balkans in a contemporary context. A day later, Heartefact is organizing a special speed dating program between actors from Serbia and Kosovo. Conceived in the form of short online meetings, in order to connect various representatives of the media, NGOs, artists and actors from institutions, the program will take place on December 15, through the Zoom platform.
The last week of the festival will be focused on Heartefact’s traditional Competition for Contemporary Engaged Drama Text. Organized for the ninth time, the online announcement of the winner and the reading of the winning piece will take place on December 22 at 5 p.m. After that, a special DJ hour will be organized, where DJ artists from Kosovo and Serbia will try to bring the cultures of the two nations closer through two musical works.
HFestival is held through the Zoom platform and Facebook live stream, and this year’s edition is realized with the support of the Ministry of Culture and Information, the Open Society Fund,the European Union Office in Kosovo and the Swiss Embassy in Belgrade.