On February 5, the City Theater of Gjilan hosted the premiere of Kabare 1999, attended by around 100 audience members. This musical theater piece transports the story from 1930s Berlin to Prishtina in 1999 – a city emerging from war, learning to live again amid hope, exhaustion, and the desire for life.
Directed by Zana Hoxha, the play creates a space where reality and performance intertwine, where life is performed as spectacle while trauma and absence quietly linger beneath the lights and music. At its center is Aida (Semira Latifi), a writer who dreams of witnessing, understanding, and recording the stories of the missing, yet finds herself drawn into a world where everything is measured by a price.
Through her and the other characters – MC (Kushtrim Qerimi), Soni (Edon Shileku), Ernesti (Gëzim Bucolli), Afërdita (Aurita Agushi), Dudija (Safete Mustafa Baftiu), Claudio (Gani Rrahmani), Agimi (Ali Demi), Gruaja (Mejreme Berisha), and the soldier (Blend Arifi) – the play reflects on freedom, subjectivity, and morality in a society just emerging from conflict.
Kabare 1999 examines how memory, hope, and the desire to live remain acts of resistance in a society striving to rebuild itself after trauma. A co-production of the City Theater of Gjilan and Artpolis, supported by the Ministry of Culture, Youth, and Sports and the Municipality of Gjilan, the play offers no easy answers but invites reflection on life, memory, and the space where freedom and tragedy coexist.
