The theme of FUTURE was highlited in the 16th edition of DokuFest, which ran from August 04-12 in Prizren, Kosovo.

The festival took a daring look into future’s uncertainties, challenges and hopes through a fusion of a carefully curated film strand, visual exhibitions, various master classes and talks, collaborative workshops, diversified music performances, as well as platforms for use of new media and new technologies.

The seeds for this edition’s theme arose from the recent years’ growing move of citizens striving to have a stronger say in their own future. The program was a glimpse between dystopias and utopias, borders and openness, fear and love.

In tight collaboration with the festival heads, we created the visual and promotional package. Future is a very wide term. In choosing it for the festival theme we narrowed it down to its sole emotional meaning. This is also what we wanted to show visually. Thus we wrote a poem which we used on all of our posters together with both of our slogans and our notebook element. 

The main difficulty was making the materials meaningful to everyone. We wanted everybody to feel something that is very personal and relatable. We wanted to show hope and positivity but also still keep the 'punk' character of the festival. We tried a lot of different colours and combinations before we settled for red/green. Visually a lot of them looked great but emotionally it was very important that we go with red and green.

Each of the posters can be stripped down to two main elements: The slogan/notebook and the poem. We chose 'Future is not dead' as an anagram to 'Punk is not dead' and 'Future is my Love' as the positive and hopeful message that we want to deliver through our campaign. The notebook shows a calendar with all the 'old' futures marked with an X leaving room to a bigger, better, brighter future. Our poem transfers all of the feelings we want to share with this editions theme. 

Obviously, we believe that one needs a good portion of optimism in everything. It is mirrored in the poem and in the slogans. We believe the possibility to be optimistic remains in everyone's mind and hearts. With this theme and campaign, we are trying to show that it is possible to have hope and be positive even in the darkest of days. Secretly, silently, without us watching, the world has been getting better in all sorts of extraordinary ways and all the adventures are still here.

Mrinë Godanca / Amer Miftari / Somer Spat / Tughan Anit / Suer Celina / Lorik Fanaj