theartsdesk in Durrës: Albania after Norman Wisdom

For decades Western cinema meant one thing. Now that's changing. Slowly

by Sheila JohnstonSunday, 04 September 2011

2011 Durrës Film Festival posterPhotographs by Sheila Johnston except where otherwise credited.

Once upon a time - and for a very long time, at that, under its hard-line Marxist leader, Enva Hoxha - world cinema was represented in Albania by Norman Wisdom. Today, 26 years after Hoxha's death and 21 years after the fall of Communism there, Durrës, the country's second largest city, has just hosted an international film festival whose guests included Francis Ford Coppola, Jiří Menzel and Claudia Cardinale. Times are changing, it would seem, and Albania is emerging at last from its wretched isolation into sophisticated cosmopolitan glamour. Though not quite as quickly or smoothly as everyone had hoped.

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