Discoveries from Albania World Cinema

A docu-fiction film that follows water from Mount Dajti into Tirana’s river, tracing how extraction, urban futures and buried histories shape land and psyche. A speculative tower rises from the river as myth, while digital avatars echo dispossession. Moving between geology, memory and politics, the film asks how cities and landscapes remember, and whether fragments of the past can resist erasure and ecological ruin.

Trapped in a vicious cycle of personal disappointments and unfulfilled fantasies, a man-the head of a household-suddenly decides to give up everything: his job, responsibilities, and social life, to pursue a long-abandoned dream of becoming a boxer. Convinced that this is the way to reclaim control over his life and the respect he's lost, he embarks on a solitary and difficult journey toward a dream that no longer recognizes him.

a film by Sara Xhengo

In the summer of 1987, Tonin Gjini swam from Albania to Yugoslavia, in search of freedom. Three decades later, he revisits the locations and recreates the events of that unforgettable experience.

Kosovo in the spring of 2000. Winter is over but in a meteorological sense only. Ruins and pain. The marks of devastation in the sunny landscape. Wounds that never heal, the hesitating , vague gestures of a new beginning. Paradoxes. In black and white, with the broken images of memory imprints in color. Two words: deca and fëmijët , they mean children in Serb and Albanian. These expressions have no place in the irrational dictionary of war. It is the children though who are the most defenseless victims of this war governed by mad hatred. Their suffering has become an indelible chapter of the chronicle at the end of the century, the dawn of the new millennium. Besarta, Violeta, Edmond and Valdrin, Miljana and Jelena are Albanian and Serb children, the film tells their story in black and white with color Super 8 images shot by the children themselves.

In Nazi occupied Albania, Ismail, a poor peasant, is torn between upholding Besa - the national code of honor and protecting his family or saving the two Jewish men he has been hiding for a year, as the Nazis arrive in his village.

Four female voices interweave a polyphonic narration of the tragic story of “Katër i Radës,” the boat that sank in 1997 due to the naval blockade imposed by the Italian government on migration flows from Albania. The relatives of the victims that were amongst the first to die, in their attempt to cross the borders of “Fortress Europe,” sail along the Strait of Otranto following the route of the doomed ship only to pose the questions ignored by the media and the judicial authorities.

Irena, a young physicist, along with two of her colleagues, undertakes an important study far from home. She goes for a health check-up at the city hospital and learns that she suffers from leukemia. After recovering from her spiritual depression, she begins to come to terms with reality, appreciating every second of her life and the love she tries to avoid.

Congress for the unification of youth.