Actor, director and professor at the Faculty of Performing Arts, Rozi Kostani has had a rich and varied career on both stage and screen in Albania and the wider region. She talks to Belkisa Zhelegu about her creative ambitions and the professional and personal challenges she’s faced in her life as an artist.
Belkisa Zhelegu: You work in a lot of fields. How do you define yourself as an artist?
Rozi Kostani: Since high school, my first calling was that of an actor even though I had a lot of opposition from my family for making this choice. In 1995, I competed for and won a place in the Academy of Arts. After four years of university, I went to Lebanon and Italy, where in three months I entered in another professional dimension, that of dance theatre.
I have always been attracted by directing because I had an urge to materialize what I felt or experienced. After completing my master’s degree in Theater Directing in Kosovo in 2010, my career as a director started there with the play Truer than the Truth. My academic career started in 2000 when I was invited as an external lecturer at the Academy and, now it’s been 24 years since I started teaching directing and acting.
Belkisa Zhelegu: What is the biggest professional challenge you’ve encountered?
Rozi Kostani: After all my sacrifices and hard work to get to know this profession in my every cell, the biggest drama I faced was when I realized that I had a lot against me. It was sad! I had a moment when I collapsed but I didn’t forget what my father told me when I articulated this out loud. He told me: “life puts many puddles of water in your path, so you must be aware that they are puddles, and that you don’t have to put your foot inside them – you have to go to the side”. Then I realized that I could go sideways without changing my career path.
Belkisa Zhelegu: How have you dealt with success as a director in Albania?
Rozi Kostani: I never had the ambition to be famous, especially in Albania, where you can be very vulnerable and it is very easy to face prejudice from the majority. To be honest, I have not experienced fame well. I just try to say what I have in my heart.
Belkisa Zhelegu: Your debut after graduating was in a role that sparked a lot of controversy in Albania at the time. How did that immediate fame mark you?
Rozi Kostani: On the day of my graduation, my professor Mira Baiti together with Spartak Papadhimitri, the film directo, offered me the role of Teuta in the movie Me, You and Cassandra. After reading the script, I saw that it contained an erotic scene, so I rejected the role. The mentality of 1999 was scary because we had just recovered from the mess of 1997, the widespread civil unrest, and it was impossible for me to do such a scene in this ‘jungle’. They promised me that they would remove the erotic scene, but instead they disloyally did it with a double, letting it be understood that she was me. The filming went very well and the film had an unprecedented audience and survived in the market over time.
On the professional level, it was a springboard into the Albanian market, but on a personal level, it was a traumatic experience. When the film was released, my family and fiancé reacted very badly even though they knew it was shot with double. People verbally attacked me – and I was only 22. I reached a stage where I isolated myself, I cut my hair so that people wouldn’t recognize me, I avoided trips so that I wouldn’t face people. It was a very mixed emotional experience, because it seemed like people adored and hated me at the same time. Acting students today are very lucky that these prejudices are not so deep.
Rozi Kostani
Belkisa Zhelegu: What has been the main conflict in your career?
Rozi Kostani: For me, it has been conflicting to face a loud silence from others, to face rumors about myself that really staggered me. People so often create strange costumes for you. The image that others create for me is very different from the one I have for myself, even though I am quite critical of myself. I still believe that I am not alone in this conflict with myself and others, that many people experience it.
Belkisa Zhelegu: Given all you’ve gone through, if your life were to be a theatre show, what would it be called and what genre would it be?
Rozi Kostani; The title of this show would be I Challenge You to Live, because I have been challenged a lot and by being challenged to live in art, I have built the Rozi that I am today. It has been exhausting because I have often faced people who have tried to deny my work and my existence in art. The show would be a drama with comic nuances and a comedy with dramatic nuances. This is life in fact!
Belkisa Zhelegu: How difficult is it to combine being a director, actress, teacher, woman and a mother?
Rozi Kostani: That’s why I said that I would call my show I Challenge You to Live, because I faced all the odds, starting with a family that didn’t want me to become an actress, then the public attacks for this erotic scene that I hadn’t even done; also from my fiancé at the time, that for him the fact that I was an actress was an obstacle and I had to convince him that acting is not a ‘hussy’ profession. Unfortunately, my family had the same opinion of this profession. My husband’s family also found it difficult, so, the biggest struggle was for him to simply accept me as I was, and maybe he, deep inside, wanted me to give up this profession. Even today, my husband suffers a bit when I take on any project, because he thinks about my absence at home resulting from my full commitment to the project.
Belkisa Zhekegu: Would you have the same approach toward him? Does the fact that you are a wife and mother affect this situation?
Rozi Kostani: Yes, of course, it affects it, because there is the stereotype that a woman should stay at home and raise the children. Thus, for us women who are artists, it is three times more difficult. We are forced to manage everything to challenge that outdated opinion that we are still, unfortunately, facing. I have to find the balance to be a good housewife and a good mother, but I don’t have time for myself, but I recover this time for myself in the theater.
Three Winters, directed by Rozi Kostani
Belkisa Zhelegu: Which shows of yours would you consider as the most important in your career and why?
Rozi Kostani: Three Winters, by Tena Štivičić, because that show is my life. When I was introduced to that work, I saw the history of my family and many details of the show are my personal details and have nothing to do with the text, but are what I went through in my childhood and adolescence.
Belkisa Zhelegu: If you were forced to choose between directing the show of your life and acting in it as the protagonist, which would you choose?
Rozi Kostani: I would choose to direct it in order to shed light on the invisible things of Rozi’s history and to make Rozi visible in all her dimensions. I believe it would be a very good motivation for the new generation. Now I am colder in relation to these events and I am not afraid of anything or anyone and I will not do anything for the sake of someone or to please others. Selfishness is exceptional in our profession, and I have known many people who have crossed limits due to greed and it is a pity. I try to save my soul from all of this.
Belkisa Zhelegu: Did you ever feel professionally or financially discriminated against as a woman?
Rozi Kostani: Yes, especially from the professional point of view. A friend of mine once told an inappropriate joke at the table “we also now have women becoming theatre directors” and I felt offended. Who says this? What right do they have? On the contrary, I think that being a director suits a woman very well because she knows how to build a family and she builds a piece of life on the stage – she creates a family-like group that only a mother feeds. Women are detail-oriented by nature, and when she is a mother, her instincts are strongly developed. In terms of the monetary aspect, I have felt discriminated against in this respect both in Albania and in Kosovo. But I always react!
Belkisa Zhelegu: Do you aspire to move into other fields professionally?
Rozi Kostani: Directing opera has always been one of my dreams. I have been teaching opera for four years now and we have performed four successful operas with the students. Film was also an early ambition of mine and this has been another challenge. When I tried to take some concrete initiatives, doors were closed to me and so I still haven’t managed to enter that field, but I’m pretty inspired – the day of turning my vision into a reality will come!
Belkisa Zhelegu: What are you working on now?
Rozi Kostani: I just premiered a production at the National Theatre of Step by Step by [UK playwright] Peter Quilter, a human comedy with all its nuances. He has an extraordinary and natural sense of humor as a writer. The play is about four best friends; one died from an illness at a very young age and the other three are going climbing in her memory. During the ascent of the mountain, the characters unfold their dramas – we are talking about women of the age of 50-60 years, an age about which not much is written, but the emotional suffering of a woman as she begins to break down psycho-physically is very strong.
Belkisa Zhelegu: In the show of your life, what would Rozi’s ending be?
Rozi Kostani: In Step by Step, I’ve tried to make visible a character who is invisible, Rebeka, who died young. About her death, there is a quote in the play that says “Rebeka died young, it’s nice that she didn’t experience physical and mental denigration.” I would have chosen such an ending for my character, Rozi was born and died on stage! The show of my life would be as close to the human as possible.
Further reading: review of Three Kingdoms
