Summer cinema in tourist sites

TIRANA, June 29 – Dozens of movies and documentaries will accompany holidaymakers on Albanian beaches and cultural heritage sites during this summer at weekends. The event organized by the Albanian Central State Film Archive, kicked off two weeks ago in southernmost district of Saranda in the Lukova and Himara beaches where documentaries on iso-polyphony, recognized by a UNESCO as a Masterpiece of the Oral and Intangible Heritage of Humanity, and tourism in southern Albania and especially in Saranda, also known as the “Pearl of the Albanian south” were screened.
On June 25 and 26, the summer cinema event moved to the coastal city of Durres featuring short films and animated movies.
This weekend, the cinema will be in Vlora, southern Albania with the screening of the Snow White ballet by Angelin Preljo袪 at the Orikum beach on Saturday July, 2. Next Sunday will feature a short film by Ilir Harxhi in downtown Vlora.
The July 9 and 10 travelling cinema event will be the lake town of Pogradec, southeastern Albania.
The even bringing movies and documentaries in tourist sites will continue until the end of next August to close in Struga and Ohrid, Macedonia.
Elvira Diamanti, the director of the Central State Film Archive, says the project to take the movies to these tourist sites is aimed at filling the vacuum of cultural events in summer.
The short films and documentaries are also related to the sites where events are held.
Since January this year, the cinema of the Central State Film Archive has been celebrating each month as a special movie event dedicated to renowned Albanian directors, among them women directors, the French cinema, animated films and most recently the Balkan cinema of the 70s and 80s.
The State Film Archive has also recently promoted a new book tracing the history of Albanian cinema. The book called “Arti i Shate ne Tirane” (The Seventh Art in Tirana) is the first of this kind being offered to the Albanian public. Written by Spiro Mehilli, it comes as a missing and necessary guide to the movies screened in the Tirana cinemas during the past century.
The book is a chronological journey on the cinemas built in Tirana, starting with the first ‘Nacional’ cinema in 1926 and also recent ones such as the cinema of the Film Archive bringing a compilation of Albanian movie history.