The jury found Bota a remarkable film with a rich script, three-dimensional characters, exquisite photography of current day Albania and beautiful nostalgic music soundtrack of past heritage.
TIRANA, July 16 – Albanian movie Bota (World) has been announced the best film in the East of the West category at the 49th Karlovy Vary International Film Festival in the Czech Republic where it made its world debut earlier this month.
“The jury found Bota a remarkable film with a rich script, three-dimensional characters, exquisite photography of current day Albania and beautiful nostalgic music soundtrack of past heritage,” the festival said on its website.
Selected in the East of the West competition and presented at a world premiere at Karlovy Vary, Bota is the directorial debut of a duo comprising Albania’s Iris Elezi and American-Albanian director Thomas Logoreci. The film also represents Kosovo’s very first involvement as a co-producing country in a first-class festival. It is joined by Albania and Italy in this tripartite production that bears a strong resemblance to a Bagdad Cafe in which the Nevada desert has given way to a godforsaken no man’s land in deepest Albania, says an article published on Cineuropa.
“Bright and delicately framed, creating a blend of different shots, with just enough editing to allow the film to set its own pace, avoiding any tedious parts, Bota is a great surprise. The viewer gets swept away by a plot that takes a while to hit its stride, but that, in the end, succeeds in building finely shaded characters, played by a trio of charismatic actors,” says the movie review by Domenico La Porta.
The movie which has received funding from the Council of Europe’s Eurimages Fund and the Global Film Initiative showed on July 5 and 6 at the town of Karlovy Vary, some 130 km west of Prague, in the East of the West Competition.
“Bota (Albanian for “the world”) is a cafe situated on the edge of a vast area of marshland in a remote part of Albania, and it is here that the lives of the protagonists intersect in this compelling debut by Iris Elezi and Thomas Logoreci. The directors skillfully exploit the genius loci of the desolate landscape and, aided by a period score and beguiling long shots, they flawlessly evoke the atmosphere of a place where the past still encroaches upon people’s lives,” says the festival on its website about the Albanian movie.
“BOTA, my first fictional film will most resemble a contemporary Days of Heaven, with spare, precise framing that will move at times from wide vistas to extreme close-up’s of objects amid naturalistic settings,” director Elezi has earlier said.
Co-director Thomas Logoreci, a San Francisco native of Albanian descent who has moved to Albania in the past few years said cooperation with Iris Elezi, who would later become his wife, started in 2008 during the Tirana International Film Festival.
“During the frantic fest week, I met Iris Elezi, a talented cineaste who pitched me her script titled BOTA, which she intended to direct. We ended up reshaping the story together – a group of outsiders working in a caf顡t the edge of a haunted swamp cope with the arrival of a highway,” Logoreci has told the Global Film Initiative, a U.S.-based, not-for-profit organization specializing in the support of independent film from Africa, Asia, Central & Eastern Europe, Latin America and the Middle East.
