Albania Unveiled. Part 2: Two Films

IV

The Forgiveness of Blood (2011), a story of spilled blood and the consequent blood feud in Albania, has an ironic title: there is a lot of blood but no forgiveness.  The previous film of the American director Joshua Marston, the excellent Maria Full of Grace (2004), portrays the journey of a young girl, working in an oppressive flower factory, who becomes a tragic drug-smuggler from Colombia to America.

In Forgiveness, Marston also tells the story from a teenage point of view.  The actors, aged 17 and 14, are locally recruited nonprofessionals.  The film is set outside Shkodra in the mountains of northwest Albania, on a lake near the border of Montenegro and 20 miles from the Adriatic Sea.  Shkodra’s population is 77,000: two-thirds Muslim, one-third Catholic, living in separate quarters of the town.

Forgiveness portrays the hopes of the children that clash with the ancient traditions.  Instead of the familiar Romeo and Juliet theme of lovers from feuding families, the film focuses on a brother and sister who suffer from a code in which they no longer believe.  It opens as their father Mark, driving a horse-drawn cabin and accompanied by his son Nik, takes the usual route to deliver his bread.  The dirt road through the land, once owned and still claimed by Mark, has been blocked with huge stones.  His neighbor Sokol, who (through bribes or influence) was given the land by the state, forces Mark to take a much longer route.  Mark’s crudely constructed, box-like, tightly-enclosed, rickety cabin is the symbol of his makeshift, hand-to-mouth traditional life.  It rocks up and down like a ship in a storm or a town in an earthquake, and is threatened (like Amish buggies) by fast cars and heavy trucks.  Similarly, the unfinished upper floor of the family’s house symbolises their unsettled feud.

In a dark, smoke-filled, raki café, two groups of men insult each other over the land dispute.  In a heated confrontation with the unarmed Mark, Sokol mocks his poverty, insults him in front of his daughter Rudina and threatens him with a long machete.  Mark then returns with his brother Zef and—off camera—holds Sokol while Zef stabs him to death.  Zef is sent to prison for sixteen years, Mark goes into hiding.

According to Kanum, their code of honour, Sokol’s murder must be avenged by the death of a male, and both Mark and Nik become targets of the victim’s family.  Mara, an older woman and Mark’s friend, describes the madness, saying “the slightest insult and they all go crazy.”  After the sudden change in their life, the family all become victims, forced to live indefinitely in uncertainty and fear.

The blood feud has ruined entire families for several generations until vengeance has been satisfied and blood flowed freely.  The remote mountains, the last stronghold of the custom that is dying out in the rest of the country, insists on the cruel reality of sudden death.  The feud, which cannot be refused without accusations of cowardice, loss of honour and intolerable shame, is Muslim in origin, rather than Judaeo-Christian.  It denies the sins of the fathers theme in Deuteronomy 24:16, “The fathers shall not be put to death for the children, neither shall the children be put to death for the fathers,” and the belief in the superiority of noble restraint in Proverbs 16:32, “He that is slow to anger is better than the mighty; and he that ruleth his spirit than he that taketh a city.”

In their ordinary life the teenaged brother and sister, Nik and Rudina, have been transformed from being completely cut off in a remote village to a gradual connection with the modern world.  They use cellphones, play video games and ride motorcycles.  But these innocent children must assume the sins of the fathers,  take the blame and suffer.  They are enclosed by the nearby mountains and trapped by the ancient code.  Their isolation and confinement resembles the life to which every Albanian had once been subjected under the repressive communist regime.

Rudina must give up her plans for the university and support the family by taking over her father’s role as bread-seller.  When she gets into bed the flowers embroidered on her sheet look like blood stains.  In a powerful scene when a café owner has bought bread from her rival who owns a car and gets there before her, she’s desperately disappointed and he tries to console her with a sandwich.  The enterprising Rudina then moves from selling bread to selling cigarettes, whose packages, smuggled in without government tax stamps, are harder to find but easier to sell.  Rudina finally abandons her bread-cabin and sadly sells her hard-working horse, who’s like a member of the family.

Mark secretly visits the family at night to take his medicine and reassure them that he’s still alive.  Nik is safe as long as he remains inside his house.  But after arranging by phone to meet his girlfriend, he risks death and leaves the house at night.  His girl also defies the strict rules and sneaks out of her own house.  Danger continues even within the home.  When the Sokols shoot into Mark’s house, the four children dive onto the floor for cover.  Fire breaks out in their barn, probably caused by the Sokols’ arson, and Nik and Rudina hopelessly try to put it out with buckets of water.

The family seeks the services of an older experienced mediator who arrives, says “my heart hurts for you” and boasts of his previous success to the sceptical family.  But the Sokols won’t agree to a mediator until Mark is put in prison.  Nik is bored and frustrated at home.  He watches Italian television and learns a bit of the language, builds the walls of the upper story, lifts weights and does pull-ups to make himself more muscular and attractive to his girlfriend.  Exposing his bursting fury and impulse to kill, he aims his loaded rifle at his young brother.

An angry confrontation occurs when Mark appears for the second time and Nik insists that his father should surrender to prison so the family can be released from their own prison.  After an informer reveals Mark’s hiding place, the police arrest him.  Though Sokol’s cousin is a policeman, Mark bribes them and is released from prison.  But it’s still difficult to extinguish the bitterness and end the feud.

The unarmed Nik dares to approach the Sokols’ house and desperately asks them to release him from his intolerable confinement.  The patriarch of the family gives him 24 hours to leave the area forever, increasing the punishment by banishing him from his family and village.  Though he has no future at home, Rudina envies him as he departs and she remains stuck in the old ways.  It’s not clear where will he go or what he will do.  Like so many Albanians, he’ll probably be forced to leave the country that has ruined his life and seek his fortune in exile.

V

In Forgiveness the enemies are vengeful Albanians; in L’America (1994) the enemies are corrupt Italians. If Forgiveness is about the destructive effect of the vendetta in modern Albania  L’America shows today’s country from an historical perspective, the lasting effects of the Italian occupation and the 45-year dictatorship that followed.  The title alludes to the generations of impoverished Italians who migrated to America at the turn of the twentieth century in search of a better life, and to the contemporary Albanians for whom Italy, across the Adriatic with its fabulous wealth and comforts shown on television, is now their equivalent of America.

Two crooks, Gino and Fiore, who have extracted funds from the Italian government to build a factory in Albania, claim they will give every Albanian a fine pair of shoes.  But they plan to build nothing and steal all the money.  The title alludes to the generations of hopeful Italians who migrated to America at the turn of the century and to the contemporary Albanians for whom Italy, across the Adriatic and alluring on television, is now their version of America.  The Italian exploiters, crossing the sea in the other direction, see Albania as a place to get rich.

In Sons of the Eagle (1938), Ronald Matthews states that Italian corruption was deep-rooted in Albania: “Many Italian lenders who had advanced money to develop Albania conceived the fine idea of diverting the proceeds of the loan to their own pockets.”  The Albanians were furious at the insolence and cupidity of those so-called experts and advisors.  To satisfy the Albanian minister in the new democratic government, the crooks find Spiro, a local man-of-straw who’ll act as a fake CEO and quietly obey their orders.  The film begins in the capital Tirana and portrays, from Gino’s point of view, his frantic race through the country in which he discovers and loses Spiro, captures and loses him again, and is finally united with him as he learns how it feels to be a humiliated and suffering Albanian.

In the 1930s Italy controlled Albania, its de facto colony, with military bases and economic power.  Ronald Matthews states that Italian corruption has been endemic in Albania: “Many Italian leaders who had advanced money to develop Albania conceived the fine idea of diverting the proceeds of the loan to their own pockets.”  The Albanians were furious at the insolence and cupidity of those so-called experts and advisors.  Fiore and Gino’s plan is nothing new.  Like Ismail Kadare’s The General of the Dead (discussed in Part 1 of this essay), L’America brilliantly directed and written by Gianni Amelio, also reveals the devastating effects of World War Two in Albania.  In the novel the General tries to rescue the dead soldiers; in the film the Italians prisoners of war have not been rescued and still live in poverty.  Both works describe fraudulent schemes.

L’America opens with an authentic propaganda newsreel showing the Adriatic port of Durrës during the April 1939 Italian invasion, which supposedly will bring civilization to backward Albania and is greeted by wildly enthusiastic crowds.  The fascists have replaced King Zog, and driven him into exile in Greece.  The film takes place 50 years later in 1991, the year after the revolution that overthrew communist dictatorship.  During Enver Hoxha’s brutal regime about a quarter of the entire population was either imprisoned or murdered, and many of hungry and desperate Albanians are now eager to leave the country.  The landscape Gino travels through is dry and desolate, the people impoverished and hopeless.  Wherever he goes in his new jeep or on foot, he is besieged by swarms of begging boys.  The country is weirdly filled with 600,000 domed concrete bunkers with slits for rifles, ordered by Hoxha from China to create fear of foreign invaders.

To satisfy the Albanian minister in the new democratic government, the two crooks must find a local man-of-straw who’ll act as a fake CEO and quietly obey their orders.  The film begins in the capital Tirana and portrays, from Gino’s point of view, his frantic race through the country in which he first finds a suitable stooge, and then loses him, captures and loses him again, and is finally united with him as he learns how it feels to be a humiliated and suffering Albanian.

Gino and Fiore find Spiro Tozai, old, broken down, in a ragged convict’s uniform, in a madhouse filled with political prisoners, and make him presentable with a new suit.  But when they take him to sign the company documents, they discover that their Albanian translator and go-between has brought them to an official who is in fact his cousin: the swindlers are now being swindled.  Spiro, still living in the prewar past, claims to be only 20 years old, his age when he was arrested by the Albanians after they drove out the Italians in 1943, and has been a prisoner for 48 years. They safely place him in an old folks’ home run by Mother Teresa’s order of nuns.

They next inspect a possible site for their scam, a horrific factory where the workers are oppressed and all the machinery is broken.  The cynical Fiore tells Gino that he had pulled the same swindle with an Italian government grant for a fake electronics factory in Nigeria, and says it was not his fault if the Africans didn’t understand electronics and never produced anything.  Fiore then goes to arrange matters in Rome and leaves Gino in charge of their project.

Gino must bring Spiro, who’s literate, to sign papers with the Albanian minister.

But Spiro wants to return to Sicily, where he thinks he still has (as he did before the war) a young wife and three-year-old son.  He suddenly runs away from the old folks’ home, gives his new suit to a stranger, and has changed from ragged clothes, to a new suit, to rags again.  He takes the train north to inland Shkodra, which does not have a ship to Italy, and Gino chases his train by car.  Meanwhile, when Spiro gets off the train, some boys steal his new shoes, the only ones produced by the Italians.  In a burst of cruel violence they push the old victim into a useless concrete bunker, light a smoky fire and asphyxiate him.

Gino finds Spiro in a hospital, and discovers from the doctor that he’s Italian, not Albanian, and had taken an Albanian name to avoid capture as an Italian deserter.  With the near-silent Spiro, who now speaks Italian, in his car, Gino stops in a roadside café where the owner is cutting up a bloody cow’s head.  He has no telephone, food or coffee, only milk from the cow that’s just been slaughtered.  When Gino comes out he sees that the policeman supposedly guarding his precious car has disappeared and that the local men have stolen its impossible-to-replace tires.  Spiro escapes again on a broken-down bus and Gino, forced to abandon his useless car, gets on just in time to keep up with him.

The police, who don’t want the crowd on the bus to reach the port and leave the country, stop them on a bridge to Durrës.  Gino and Spiro must walk along the tracks of a train that does not run.  A second café has no coffee or mineral water, only raki, bread and cheese.  Poor people in the café watch glamorous programs on Italian television and believe “it’s a different story over there.”  They think Italy, their “America,” is a paradise of wealth and women, where even death is gentler than in Albania.

As they continue their via dolorosa in a crowded open truck, Spiro thinks he’s in Italy and going home.  A scrawny sick man, who’s been tended by Spiro, dies in the truck and is laid out like a Renaissance Christ in the Tomb.  In the next town it’s raining, Gino and Spiro sit in front of a stark war monument and next to a starving child, and have to stay in a terrible hotel.  The prison, old folks’ home, factory, train, bus, truck, cafés and hotel are all unspeakably grim.

Gino manages to call Fiore in Rome and his silent expression reflects the crushing news.  The Italians have discovered their scam and Gino is ruined.  The two men are now transformed.  Spiro, whose real name is Michele Talarico, gradually becomes more Italian.  Gino, desperate and depressed, becomes more Albanian.  As they change roles Spiro tries to comfort him.  Gino no longer needs Spiro and bribes a hotel owner to keep him.  A skinny little girl, who hopes to perform in Italy, does a frantic dance to the music on television.

When Gino returns to Tirana and crosses through ranks of soldiers in Skanderbeg Square to reach his hotel, he sees a boy pretending to be a cripple to beg for money.  Gino is immediately arrested and thrown into a filthy dark cell.  Like Spiro, he now becomes a passive victim.  Gino signs a confession when the police chief tells him they want to convict the corrupt Albanian minister—the man who took the bribe, not the one who gave it—and will allow Gino, who’s lost his passport, to leave the country.

On the tremendously crowded battered ship to Italy, like the worst steerage passage to America, Gino like everyone else is crushed.  Spiro, a true survivor, has somehow left the hotel and boarded the ship, and Gino finds him sitting on the deck handing out bread to the children.  Happy to be finally going home, he again tries to comfort Gino, who’s lost everything, including his passport and identity as a privileged Italian.

Spiro now does the talking, Gino remains gloomy and silent.  As they head across the Adriatic to Italy, Spiro leans his head on Gino, just as the dying man in the truck had leaned on him.  Gino, who has escaped prison but been punished for his crimes, wanted to rescue as well as exploit Spiro.  He finally discovers that the people he’s been trying to swindle are terribly poor and have nothing.  A defeated but sympathetic character, exploited by his boss Fiore, he had been left behind to deal with the mess and take the blame.  The film ends with many silent poignant close-ups of the sad faces of the Albanian passengers.

It’s ironic that the real victim is not an Albanian but Spiro, the old Italian prisoner of war who was abandoned by his country.  Imprisoned for most of his adult life, his health is ruined, he’s lost all sense of reality and deludes himself about his family patiently waiting for him in Sicily.  He returns, a broken man on a filthy refugee ship. Spiro’s grim voyage, the harsh reception, bitter disillusionment and tragic fate he will suffer in Italy, ironically recalls the uplifting poem that the Italian immigrants saw (but could not read) on the Statue of Liberty when they first reached America: “give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses, yearning to breathe free.”

These five books and films suggest the best way to deal with the hopeless and violent Albania is to leave it.  The General goes back to Italy with as many corpses as he can carry.  Jones and Carver look around and return to New Zealand and England. Nik leaves his family and village, and probably joins the mass exodus.  Gino and Spiro cross the Adriatic to an uncertain, even tragic, future.

Jeffrey Meyers will publish James Salter: Pilot, Screenwriter, Novelist and Parallel Lives: From Freud and Hitler to Arbus and Plath with Louisiana State University Press in 2024.

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