Some cities are made by a fortress, some by a river; for twenty-five years, Prizren has also been made by a festival.

From 7 to 15 August 2026, Prizren hosted the 25th edition of DokuFest, the International Documentary and Short Film Festival. Over nine days, according to figures given by Kosovo's acting prime minister, Albin Kurti, at the closing ceremony, 223 films were screened in seven cinemas, 114 of them competing in eight categories. The prize for best film in the national competition went to “In Search of Poetry” by Albanian director Lorin Terezi.

The figures are impressive for a small city, but they do not tell the whole story. What makes DokuFest distinctive is not only the number of films, but the way the festival has embedded itself in the body of the city.

A cinema on the river, a screen at the fortress

Since its founding in 2002, DokuFest has turned Prizren's historic centre into a shared stage for cinema, art and community, screening more than two hundred carefully selected films from around the world every year. It did not shut itself inside a conference hall. Over the years, films have been shown in the city's cinemas, at the fortress and even on improvised platforms over the river that runs through Prizren. The photograph accompanying this piece, showing the improvised venue over the water at the 2017 edition, conveys this spirit better than any description.

This choice has a deep meaning. Documentary is the genre that turns its eyes to reality, to real people and places. A documentary festival that screens films in the living spaces of the city, instead of isolating the audience in dark halls, extends that relationship with reality beyond the screen. Viewers leave a film and find themselves at once in the streets of a city with a many-layered history.

From provincial town to the European map

Over a quarter of a century, DokuFest has earned a recognised place on the international map. Today it is a qualifying festival for the BAFTAs and the European Film Awards, while the American magazine Filmmaker has twice ranked it among the 25 coolest film festivals in the world. For young filmmakers from Kosovo, Albania and the region, this means something concrete: their films are shown at an event attended by programmers, producers and journalists from abroad, without their having to travel to Berlin or Cannes.

The fact that this year's main national competition prize went to a director from Albania points to another dimension of the festival. The border between the two Albanian states, still visible in many fields, fades in Prizren. DokuFest has become one of the places where Albanian cinema from both sides meets, compares itself and gets to know itself.

Culture as development, not decoration

The DokuFest story is often told as a tourism success: hotels full in August, lively restaurants, a city in the news. That reading is not wrong, but it is insufficient. What the festival has built in Prizren is above all a community: volunteers who grow up with it, audiences who return year after year, a young generation that has come to see documentary cinema as a normal part of its summer.

For other small cities in Kosovo and Albania, the lesson is not to copy DokuFest. It is to understand that a lasting cultural event is born not from an administrative decision or a one-off grant, but from continuity. Twenty-five editions mean twenty-five summers of work, often in difficult conditions, in a place that in this time has been through war, transition and many political crises.

At its jubilee edition, DokuFest did not celebrate only itself. It recalled that culture, when it has roots in a place, can change the way that place sees itself. Prizren did not become a festival city overnight. It became one because someone decided, one summer in 2002, to put up a screen, and then never took it down.

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