European Week brings alternative cinema

TIRANA, May. 5-9: To celebrate European Week, a variety of cultural activities such as photo exhibitions, classical music, choir concerts and dance performances are being staged in Tirana’s artistic sites, including the Academy of Arts and the National Theater of Opera and Ballet. Additionally, movies highlighting different European directors were shown at the Black Box of the Arts Academy. On Saturday, a movie from the Hungarian director Szabolcs Hajdu, “White Palms,” brought together a crowd of nostalgic ex-students of Budapest, as well as a primarily international community, to view an uncommonly resonant sports drama in which a talented, yet troubled, gymnast comes to terms with a turbulent past.
On Sunday, a professional adaptation by Dutch director Jeroem Krabbe, of Henry Mulisch’s “Discovery Of Heaven”, combined elements of fantasy and human psychology in a quasi-thriller of Christian mythology. The Discovery of Heaven tells the story of an angel-like being, who is ordered to return the stone tablets containing the ten commandments to Heaven. The Tablets given to Moses by God, symbolize in the book the link between Heaven and Earth. The divine being, however, cannot himself travel to Earth, and on several occasions in the book resorts to influencing events, being in effect a deliberate personification of deus ex machina. He affects the personal lives of three people (two men and one woman) in order that a child be conceived. This child would then have an innate desire to seek out and return the Tablets.