Wake Up On Mars
Furkan is the youngest member of a Roma family from Kosovo. He was quite young when the family fled to Sweden, where they live now, waiting in limbo for their pending asylum request. Furkan's sisters, Ibadeta and Djeneta, have been in a coma-like state for several years. Traumatized by the fear of being sent back to Kosovo, a mysterious illness, "resignation syndrome", has befallen them. Furkan decides to try to save his sisters in his own way: he starts to build a spaceship to travel to Mars.
Dea Gjinovci is a Swiss-Albanian director/producer with a background in economics and anthropology. She is a 2019 Sundance Talent Forum alumna and a 2019 Film Independent Fellow. Her documentary short Sans le Kosovo (2017) screened at several international festivals and won Best National Film at Dokufest International Film Festival. Her debut feature-length documentary, Wake Up on Mars (2020), received support from the Sundance Film Institute and Ford Foundation JustFilms, and won the “Perspectives d’un doc” pitch award at Visions du Réel 2018. In June 2018, she co-founded Amok Films with fellow filmmaker Antoine Goldet, in Paris.