By ervin lisaku
TIRANA, Oct. 25 – Twenty years after the collapse of one of Europe’s harshest communist regime, Albania has undergone tremendous transformation regarding the country’s opening up, democracy, infrastructure and freedom of speech and religion. However, for many suffering persecution and imprisonment because of their different views under the 45-year cruel regime life has not been that easy after the early 90s.
One of them is Dilaver Xhemali, a former political prisoner jailed only for creating a painting showing dictator Enver Hoxha’s face half white, half black. This cost the artist several years of imprisonment in Spac, the notorious prison of the former-politically persecuted people who were also engaged in forced labour.
Twenty years after his release from prison following the student protests of December 1990 that led to the establishment of a multi-party system, his life seems to have changed for the worse.
“I escaped from a camp and came to another camp,” says the elderly man in a documentary screened last weekend in Tirana as part of a conference organized by the Albanian Institute for International Studies (AIIS).
For the past 20 years, Dilaver Xhemali has been living in an abandoned room in the chemical-polluted steel plant facilities of Elbasan, central Albania. Ironically enough, a pre-trial detention center is being built in the plant’s former facilities.
The 17-minute “Painted Black” documentary telling Dilaver Xhemali’s story was directed by Anis Leka in a Marubi Film Academy production supported by the German Friedrich-Ebert Foundation.
Asked why he had painted in black and white the face of Enver Hoxha, whose portrait was considered a cult during his four decades as leader of the single-party regime, Xhemali told interrogators “How could I paint his face all white?”
His wife also suffered the consequences of Xhemali’s art attacking the untarnished portrait of the dictator and was asked to divorce him.
However, 20 years later, Xhemali, one of the regime’s thousands of victims, seems to have suffered much more health problems during his stay in the steel plant’s contaminated facilities than in the Spac prison camp, which is proved even during a medical check-up he undergoes.
Introducing the documentary at the Tirana International Hotel, Michael Weichert, the head of the Friedrich Ebert Foundation Office in Tirana, described the story as the perfect documentation of the debate in the two-day conference bringing together Albanian and international experts to discuss Albania’s progress and challenges ahead 20 years after the communist collapse.
Another documentary produced by the Marubi Academy, Albania’s only private film school, was “20 years old.” The documentary featuring the city of Korca explored the changes that have taken place in the country’s biggest southeastern city during the past 20 years, known for its early western culture. Using four youngsters the shooting crew brought pieces of humour mixed with drama and traditional ‘serenade’ songs of Korca also known as the “small Paris of Albania.”
