Follows rural GP Dr Ylli Hasani who risked imprisonment in totalitarian Albania by listening to the BBC World Service to keep up to date with world events, especially English football.
A documentary that investigates the complexity of a nation, Albania, through the narration of the convoluted history of its monuments. What happens to the statues when they are destroyed, what are they replaced with and where do their marble shreds end up? What happens to their expensive bronze? And again: what do the sculptors who made these statues think of these destructions, what is their opinion. And today? Which statues are being destroyed in Albania today?
The story of Viktor Stratoberdha (1921-1991) mirrors many of Albania’s tragedies. Stradoberdha’s humorous, buoyant style led him to be one of the country’s most promising filmmakers. But after being denounced in 1956, he was expelled from the Kinostudio and sent into internal exile. In 1967, Stratoberdha directed a local theater play in which the economic five year plan was placed in a coffin. He was then jailed for the next two decades. Urime Shokë Studentë! is one of the surviving documentaries of Viktor Stratoberdha’s all too short career.
Made by the highly influential Russian cameraman Roman Karmen, this documentary vividly features Albanian life immediately after the communists came to power in 1944. The film is especially memorable since it’s missing much of the heavy socialist realism that marked Albanian doc making. Shortly after he completed the film, Karmen set off for Berlin to shoot the Soviet victory over Nazi Germany.
Mad dictators, trigger-happy mobs, archaic blood feuds - this pretty much sums up what Western Europeans know about Albania. But reality in this long forgotten Balkan country is much more complex and multilayered. SHQIPERIA - NOTES FROM ALBANIA offers a flow of stories from and about Albania, displaying the country in its true diversity, unspeculatively illuminating its conflicts and discovering this blank spot on the map of Europe in all its contradictions.
A dramatic depiction of honor, family feuds and thousand-year-old traditions. In Albania, the tradition of avenging an injustice according to the motto "an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth" still lives on. This has led to people being trapped in their homes for fear of being murdered due to a family feud.
After a disagreement with his teacher, a young boy runs away.
After the foreign specialists leave, engineer Lulëzim is left in charge of building the Fierza Hydroelectric Power Station.
Jeta is a student who is a member of the illegals and tries to create a group of antifascist girls in her school.
An unbaptized woman is killed because of the regressive mentality existing in the mountains of northern Albania.
Children get ready to start the first grade. They start learning the first letters.
Hëna, who works in a construction site, falls in love with another worker, Agim.
A spectacle featuring the children of the puppet theater.
An old man refuses to undergo an operation in the hospital because he does not trust the abilities of the female surgeon.
Deda, an enthusiastic young worker, is trying to fix a cut telephone line during the harsh winter, so that people can wish each other a happy New Year.
Germans come amid snow and winter. In the village only people remained are women, that fight until wounded partisans, sheltered in the village, will retreat deeper and snow will cover their tracks. Face to face with the Germans and their control of the village, women, led by mother Shano and mother Mara, depart to make a pile of wood, but actually bring bread and food to the partisans.
Events take place in an isolated mountaineous village where a rabid dog bites the son of Fatime. The woman has to decide where to take her son, to the doctor or to Aunt Remja, an old woman who practices magic.
Filmmaker Mark Cousins goes to Albania for five days, and films what he sees. He discovers that the movie prints in the country's film archive are decaying. In investigating this, Cousins begins to encounter bigger questions about the history and memory of a place. Perhaps a country whose 20th Century, dominated by its authoritarian ruler Enver Hoxha, was so traumatic, should allow its film heritage to fade away? Perhaps a national forgetting should be welcomed? Influenced by the films of Chris Marker, Cousins' film broadens to consider the architecture of dictators and the great icon paintings of Onufri. In the past, when cartographers knew little about a country, they wrote on it Here be Dragons. Albania was, for decades, one of the least well know countries in the world. Cousins' road movie meditation takes the advice of Goethe: "If you would understand the poet, you must go to the poet's land."