Dea Gjinovci is a Swiss-Albanian director and producer. She is a 2019 Sundance Talent Forum alum and 2019 Film Independent Fellow. Her award-winning documentary short “Sans le Kosovo” screened at several international festivals and won Best National Film at Dokufest International Film Festival. In June 2018, Gjinovci co-founded Amok Films with fellow filmmaker Antoine Goldet in Paris. “Wake Up on Mars” is her debut feature-length documentary.

“Wake Up on Mars” was scheduled to screen at the 2020 Tribeca Film Festival, which has been postponed due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

W&H: Describe the film for us in your own words.

DG: It is the story of an asylum-seeking family who is faced with a mysterious illness that has brought their two daughters into a comatose state for several years. The youngest brother, Furkan, is deeply affected by his sisters’ condition, with his imagination becoming a way for him to feel closer to his sisters and escape the daily difficulties that his family encounters.

This is a film about hope, resilience, and sacrifice within a family.

W&H: What drew you to this story?

DG: I first read about resignation syndrome in a New Yorker article that was published in April 2017. The first picture in the article was of two sisters, Ibadeta and Djeneta, two Roma girls from Kosovo. I couldn’t get their story out of my head, and kept thinking about how powerful our mind can be when faced with trauma.

As my father also comes from Kosovo, I knew I shared the same language and culture, and knew I had to find a way to meet them.

Visually, I was drawn by this story because I wanted to express in images of what could be felt by these two sisters.

W&H: What do you want people to think about after they watch the film?

DG: I want people to feel a sense of kinship with this family. I want people to recognize the strength, dignity, and sense of sacrifice that this family and families who migrate and ask for asylum are showing every day.

This is a film that is empathetic. I would love for audiences to identify with Furkan’s need to take action and his dream of space, to feel close to the mother Nurje’s fear that it might happen to her son as well, and to the kindness and dedication that the father and older brother have for Ibadeta and Djeneta, and the whole family.

This is a film that focuses on the personal to say something bigger about the political.

W&H: What was the biggest challenge in making the film?

DG: I think the biggest challenge in making this film was convincing funders and producers that the creation of the spaceship was possible within a documentary shoot setting. As it is very rarely done, it was also a big risk we were taking in terms of production and financially, making sure that it could work in the edit.

Once we got into the editing room it took us a few months to find the right balance between the dream-like elements and the observational footage, but when we did, all of it felt worth it.

W&H: How did you get your film funded? Share some insights into how you got the film made.

DG: It took us quite a long time to get our first funding for the film, about ten months. Our first grant came from the Sundance Documentary Fund, which opened up a lot of doors whilst also giving me access to fantastic mentoring and support from the Sundance Institute. The day after finding out that we got the Sundance grant, we won a pitching award at Visions du réel in Switzerland that led to a co-production offer from the national Swiss broadcaster, Radio Télévision Suisse.

As the film is co-produced in both Switzerland and France, we also got pre-acquisition from France Télévisions and further support from the National Centre for Cinema and the Moving Image, and other state funds. In Switzerland, we received funding from state and regional funds, the Swiss Federal Office For Culture, Cinéforom, UBS foundation, and other funders.

We also decided to seek further funding in the U.S. I got to participate in the Sundance Talent Forum and Film Independent Lab in 2019, which gave me the opportunity to meet funders such as Ford Foundation, nonfiction studio XTR Films, and Perspective Fund, who ended up supporting our film at crucial stages.

In postproduction, we also received funding from the Doha Film Institute, as well as a second Sundance grant.

Throughout the making of the film, we were struggling with a financing gap because we were also covering costs related to the fictionalized aspects of the film with a budget that was made for a documentary.

Overall, we are really grateful that we got so much support, especially for a debut feature.

W&H: What inspired you to become a filmmaker?

DG: I decided I wanted to become a filmmaker when I was 15 years old. I had always been very creative, but also very drawn to history and social sciences. Following my studies in Economics and Politics, I understood that I would never be happy working for a larger organization or a government. I thought I would have to make too many moral and behavior compromises to be a part of it.

Being an independent director and a producer, I get to decide what I want to work on and who I want to work with, and that kind of freedom is quite rare.

Filmmaking gives me the possibility to focus on understanding the human experience — my role is to feel what my characters are feeling, and to go beyond that to interpret what their stories mean in the bigger scheme of things and how audiences can relate to them, even if they seem peculiar at first.

W&H: What’s the best and worst advice you’ve received?

DG: The worst advice: anybody who has told me that I was making a “small” film. So much distinction has been made now between commercial documentaries and what is perceived as non-commercial or “smaller” films. I don’t think that distinction is really relevant, especially after watching films like “Hale County This Morning, This Evening,” “Minding the Gap,” “Honeyland,” or “For Sama” and seeing the kind of attention they’ve received in the past few years.

I think audiences are getting more sophisticated in what they want to see, and how daring we can be with the documentary form and the subjects we decide to focus on.

The best advice I’ve received: don’t back down. My mother always told me that when I felt like I was taken advantage of, or something was unjust, I had to plead my case and value myself and my work. No one else will do it for you. Especially when you start as a young filmmaker — you feel already so lucky that you are being given a chance, you’re afraid of making waves or of valuing your work too much. That is a mistake. It is important from the get-go to understand that what you’re creating has value, and that you deserve to be treated fairly.

W&H: What advice do you have for other female directors?

DG: I think some of the advice I would have given myself earlier on in the film process was to not lower my budget to make things happen, because that means you are paying yourself less than what you actually need to survive to make a documentary over a few years.

Similarly, cutting corners and not paying quite decent salaries to crew and collaborators is not great for morale, and is not fair to the dedication and talent of people working with you. I think it’s always best to ask for more and be pragmatic about how much things will actually cost.

What has shocked me the most in the past few years, looking at statistics in the cinema industry, is seeing the disparity in film budgets between men and women directors. In France, for a fiction film, female-directed films have an average budget of 3.5 Mio, whilst male-directed films have a budget of 4.7 Mio. More so, female directors are paid 42 percent less on average than male directors.

These are disastrous statistics, and it also shows that we need more transparency in the ways film budgets and funding are distributed. Especially because if the benchmarks are not known, then female-directed films will always get less funding. Less funding means less visibility, which means less power within the industry.

W&H: Name your favorite woman-directed film and why.

DG: Thinking about fiction, I would say probably “American Honey” by Andrea Arnold, because her film is like a whirlwind trance that you get on — the movement, the proximity, the naturalistic ways of her characters, who are not so likable, but you still feel close to them and somehow understand their ways. When I went to the cinema to watch it, time flew by.

Thinking about documentaries, I would say “The Wolfpack” by Crystal Moselle. I watched it when I was still doing my master’s in ethnographic practice and documentary film, and it truly blew me away. Seeing these boys reenacting movie scenes, and seeing them escape a solitary life through their imagination — it made me want to explore the different ways we could film a reality and how these ways could be metaphorical, magical or fantastical. How do we recreate people’s imagination on the screen to understand them better?

W&H: What differences have you noticed in the industry since the #MeToo and #TimesUp movements launched?

DG: I feel that there is probably more awareness and more possibilities to confront harassment, sexual violence, and discrimination at every level, but I don’t really know. I think I haven’t been part of the industry long enough to really feel a change. The change is probably more visible in fiction films than in documentaries.

I still think that the biggest changes that need to happen are structural — more women and minorities in positions of power, bigger budgets for female and minority-directed films, larger marketing campaigns for these films, and perhaps even quotas on hiring practices.