Cinema of the era of socialist realism: Albania Enver Hoxha Late 1945. The Great War is over, but there are no bravura celebrations on Albanian soil. Soldiers, someone’s fathers, husbands, sons are finally returning home, to cities, towns and villages slowly rising from the ashes. Once young faces are dotted with hot winds, covered with a web of nervous wrinkles, labor hands have become coarse even more, and the unbearable pain of daily losses has frozen in the eyes. But returning home does not bode well for them, for Albania and its fellow countrymen are entering the time of socialism, for many people marking only the unknown, and not the promised earthly benefits.
1964. Rather a zealous Maoist than a staunch Stalinist, the Ruler of the All Albanian People's Socialist Republic Enver Hoxha has already lowered a blank iron curtain steeper than the Soviet one over his patrimony, but Albanian representatives of the art world (writers, poets, directors and screenwriters who are still waiting for a local version of the "cultural revolution" from Khoja), even in conditions of fatal for any creator ideologicalism with a taste of socialist realism, try to create interesting and integral works in artistic terms, although they remain almost unknown outside the NSR. In 1964, the fast-paced conformist and propagandist, director Heisen Hakani, who had shot only three years earlier the banal agitation “Debats”, presented his best film “Our Land” to the public and the party.
In fact, a new and not at all his land becomes for returning from the war guerrilla Leki his native village, entering the era of cardinal reorganization and deconstruction of the usual foundations. Painful collectivization begins, and the village people accept it with great skepticism, and the local rich Touch Maki does not seek to give his. Against this background, Lecky develops a complex relationship with Murrashi’s brother, an ardent communist, and Lochey’s mother.
At first glance, it seems that Khakani’s Our Land looks like a frank paraphrase of many Sholokhov’s works and, in particular, his famous “Virgin Raised”. But this opinion is erroneous, because only the common motive of collectivization unites Celina and Our Land, and artistically the film’s fabric is most intertwined with the poetics of the Albanian prose writer Ismail Kadare. Woven according to the classical canons of socialist realism, the film is not an empty political agitation, and political thought does not overshadow artistic thought.
Formally, the main character of the film is Leki, a bright individualist, for whom the private is more important than the public. Why formally? The film is polyphonic in its artistic embodiment and the narrative does not revolve only around Leka. The director pays attention to Marrushi, Loche, and Touch Maku, while the characters are in constant internal development. Before the viewer, in turn, the almost Shakespearean drama of difficult family relations plays out, when the brother goes to his brother, and the political disputes between Lecky and Murrashi acquire drama and intensity of the stands. In the images of Lecky and Murrashi, two opposing points of view on the coming changes in the country are outlined and, although the finale becomes predictable, Lecky’s point of view looks more convincing in the film and not overshadowed by communist brainwashing. A lot about Leka as a person speak and show scenes in the church, some of the most memorable and dramatic saturated in the film, scenes in which the hero is shown to believers; for Leki God is more important than Marx and Mao and from the director’s side, this move in the film looks quite bold and provocative, given the declared Khoja atheistic state system of Albania.
Extremely important in the structure of the film are the images of Lochi, the mother, who was brilliantly played by the cult actress of Albanian totalitarian cinema Maria Logoretsy. In this character you can see the features of the main character of another work of Soviet literature, “Mother” Maxim Gorky. The same sacrifice, the same patriotism and merciless love. Locha becomes a symbol of Albania itself, which is tormented by its sons in the moment of change. But the image of the feudal owner and pest Cloud Maki came out rather stilted and template, although it sang all the characteristic features of the enemy capitalists.
"Our Land" is a little-known, but very intriguing film of the Albanian cinema of the time of Enver Hoxha. Despite the political orientation and a certain naivety characteristic of most of the creations of the cinema of totalitarian countries, Our Land is quite capable of interesting the despondent to the rarities of the viewer, and if we reject the ideology at all, Our Land is perceived as a relevant and now a film about the opposition of individualism to the masses and about the obvious consequences of this.