Wake Up On Mars (2020)

Wake Up On Mars (2020) / Country: Switzerland / Director: Dea Gjinovci / Length: 74 min / Language: Swedish, Albanian / Subtitles: Albanian, English / Entrance: FREE

10-year-old Furkan dreams of building a spaceship out of old scrap and escaping from the world of adults. His Muslim Roma family from Kosovo has ended up in Sweden, where they desperately try to obtain asylum after a first rejection. The endless tragedy has sent Furkan’s two young sisters into a mysterious and years-long coma called resignation syndrome. Out in the woods, where the pine trees stretch toward the same sky that he dreams of disappearing into, Furkan continues to build his spaceship while the family try to keep their hopes up. A poetic yet heartbreaking fairy tale where documentary reality meets magic realism.

Dea Gjinovci is a Swiss-Albanian director-producer based in between Paris and Geneva. She is currently a resident at UnionDocs in NYC and participated in the 2021 EsoDoc lab, the 2019 Sundance Talent Forum and is a 2019 Film Independent Fellow. Her award-winning documentary short 'Sans le Kosovo' won Best National Film at Dokufest in 2017. Her debut feature-length documentary ‘Wake Up on Mars’ was co-produced by the Radio Télévision Suisse with the participation of France Télévisions and received support from the Sundance Film Institute, the Ford Foundation, the Doha Film Institute, XTR and was awarded the RTS pitch prize at Visions du Réel 2018. It premiered at the 2020 Tribeca Film Festival and Visions du Réel in Switzerland, and was selected in more than forty international festivals. She was awarded "Best New Talent" mention at Biografilm Festival 2020 and at ZagrebDox 2021. “Wake Up on Mars” was also nominated for the prestigious "Prix de Soleure" and "Opera Prima" awards at Solothurner Tage 2021. In 2022, it was nominated for Best Documentary at the Swiss Film Awards. As a producer, her most recent projects were pitched at the Sheffield Meet Market, IFP/Gotham Week, Medimed, Edinburgh Pitch, Sunny Side and the Holland Film Meeting. Dea holds a BA (Hons) in Economics and Politics from SOAS (University of London) and a Master in Ethnographic and Documentary Film from UCL (University of London). She speaks four languages: French, English, Italian and Albanian.