Bota, a 2014 film by director and UNL Film Studies alumna Iris Elezi and her husband, Thomas Logoreci, has been chosen as the Albanian entry for Best Foreign Language Film at the 88th Academy Awards, to be held in 2016. Elezi studied with Professors Wheeler Winston Dixon and Gwendolyn Audrey Foster during her time at UNL. Elezi noted that her course in women filmmakers with Professor Foster was particularly meaningful for her.
The title of the film, Bota, means 'The World' in Albanian. It is also the name of the small cafe around which the events of the film are set, located near the outskirts of an isolated village in Albania's rural marshlands. The bleak surroundings help set the tone for this melancholy dramedy, which explores the tension of the relationship between modern-day Albanians and the country's dark past.
"More and more, my country [Albania] is becoming just another country," Elezi told Cineurope in a video interview last year. "I'm trying to grab and capture some of the nuances that made us who we were in the past as we are trying to find ourselves in the future."
After graduating from UNL, Elezi went on to graduate work at NYU, then traveled the Balkans and Eastern Europe making a multi-part documentary series about the region and the effects of its history on modern society. The resulting series, Under Construction, led her to begin writing Bota based on the narratives of Albanian men and women interned as "enemies of the state" during Albania's half-century of communist rule.
The film premiered in 2014 at the 49th annual Karlovy Vary International Film Festival in the Czech Republic, where it won the FEDEORA award for the best film in the East of the West program. Bota went on to win several other honors, including a special jury prize at the South East European Film Festival in Los Angeles, the FIPRESCI prize at the Reykjavik film festival, and best feature at Pogradec's Balkan film festival.
"This is a real accomplishment for Iris," notes Professor Dixon. "Years of hard work, and it’s paid off. Iris just sent both myself and Professor Foster a note with the good news – we’re really happy for her success!"
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Trailer/TV Spot (with English subtitles)
