Ilir Hasanaj

Parvaneh is a young Afghan immigrant who recently arrived at a transit centre for asylum seekers in the Swiss Alps. The only things she has got to know yet are the rural area surrounding the centre and the centre itself.

Three young people visit three cities over three months as part of an ambitious and transformative art project that creates musical and performance pieces.

After her father Asllan has lived in exile for sixty years, Dea returns with him to Makermal. This Kosovar village that was once his home was destroyed in the war, leaving only the stories of the survivors. Together with the remaining villagers, Swiss-Kosovar director Dea Gjinovci and her father embark on a search for traces of the past and are confronted with the collective scars of a community.

Home is a feeling, they say, but where is home, when you are not allowed to feel at home even within your own body and mind? As I Was Looking Above, I Could See Myself Underneath unveils intimate stories of LGBTQ persons from Kosovo, going through their unceasing search for a safe place that allows them to be.

Milazim, Fatmir and Liridon are veteran manual labourers who experienced accidents in their workplaces in Kosovo, Europe's youngest country. In this poetic experimental documentary tribute to a now almost extinct class of people, Ilir Hasanaj gives voice to gentle, sincere and dignified, but almost invisible individuals, who fell prey to harsh and primitive capitalistic machinery and policy in the Balkans.