The Multimedia Center for Visual Arts, where we held the MY HERO / GLOBAL EXCHANGE workshops, is a production space rented in the Dodona Theater in Prishtina. Jeton Neziraj, our Kosovan Site Administrator, is a famous local playwright. At the time of our workshops, one of his plays was being performed at the National Theater.

Kosovans were very grateful that MY HERO came to their hometown to mentor them in video production and storytelling. Hopefully next year MY HERO will return to Prishtina and bring more tools to the Multimedia Center to help local students, artists and activists tell their stories of hope and redemption.

In Prishtina the war is at the forefront of everyone's mind. So when we proposed making movies about heroes and people they admired, it was not surprising that they all made movies about Kosovo, the war and its aftermath. The participants in our workshops in the Dodona Theater were mostly ethnic Albanians except for one young man of Egyptian descent and and his ex-pat American wife. The people who attended the workshops were students, artists, writers, human rights activists and actors.

Like in Macedonia, the workshops started with a presentation of the MY HERO Project and how to make values-based hero stories. Then we learned how to use the camcorder and did camera exercises. Once the participants recorded the media they wanted, they started learning Photoshop and Final Cut Pro so they would be able to edit their own movies.

At the end of our five days in Kosovo, the participants of the workshops produced six movies that mostly involved street interviews. Surprisingly everyone in Kosovo was very open and willing to talk to strangers with cameras. Three high school students who were interviewed in the street during Skip's camera exercises, were so enthusiastic about our project that they later joined our group and made a movie. Here are some of the films created during this workshop:

Kosovo Heroes (Quicktime - 3:07 Minutes) Produced by Arben Zharku

Evilmakers Hero Project (Quicktime - 2:47 Minutes) Produced by Evilmakers (Needs Translation)

That Was All I Had to Say (Quicktime - 2:34 Minutes) Produced by Shota Bukoshi