The renovated hall of the University of Arts was packed on the evening of September 3, when the Albanian National Film Festival opened for the first time after a 14-year absence. In the small, narrow seats (without the proper space between each other) that have shrunk from the restoration and numb even small, weak bodies, the cream of Albanian film sat.
After 14 years, symbolically, these poorly designed seats in a new, expensively paid-for theater gather Albanian film produced in 14 years, in a film celebration.
But, just as the seats are too small for the guests, the 14-year production is cramped in a capital that seems to have forgotten cinema for a long time.
In an interview for News24Ilir Butka, artistic director of the Festival, reveals the reasons for the absence, from the change of directors to the inadequacy of production to the Achilles heel, the films are produced but have no promotion or distribution.
"In 14 years, 200 films have been produced, the festival screens about 100 of them in 10 days," says Butka, while trying to focus on the celebration, leaving aside the lack of budgets, cinemas, and the promotion and distribution network, which according to him is also lacking in the conception of state institutions.
While taking the example of the Sarajevo Festival, which gave life and name to an entire state, Butka leaves aside the problems, not to hide them, but so that we don't complain at a time of celebration.
In a country where even when there are films, there is not much of an audience, or in a country where the same audience travels from one festival to another, again small in number compared to the concerts of pop artists who are social media stars, is it likely that a film festival will change its approach and create a new generation that not only follows Albanian film, but also aims to become the king of film, following the filmmakers' dream?
For Butka, the goal is this: to undo that great distance created between Albanian film and the Albanian audience, and this will be the great success or great failure of the festival.
"It will be the narrowing of this gap that will show," he said, "if the seats are small for a large cinema, at a time when the film festival, the (debated) new law on cinematography integrating a series of technological innovations, modest efforts for cinema chains and the desire to have young people passionate about the seventh art, will produce more than an annual event or, on the contrary, in the end, those seats are a harbinger of a small country, with small halls, small seats, small budgets, and ideas that even when they are big, are shrunk by great impossibilities."
The new films of recent years, for a number of reasons, have failed to reach everyone and everywhere, not only because the directors are not Nolan and we are not Hollywood, but also because in the transition from a successful but indoctrinated cinema to a cinema that aims to find itself in freedom, artistic research took time, we lost the structures, the connection between generations, the budgets and the links that make cinema cinema.
Even the few times someone looked at it, there was no continuity and it remained within the framework of temporary agendas or temporary use. Cinema, like any art, is not a periodic campaign, it is a permanent work that requires strategies, mechanisms, laws, budgets, agreements and artists who are free not only from political powers, but also from economic ones.
