INPUT Albania, a new inspirational event to Albanian producers

TIRANA, May 2 – MINI INPUT Albania, is the newest event which took place in the recent days in Tirana. The non-profit organization named INPUT which started its activity in 1977 with the purpose to promote TV documentaries produced by public televisions came this year again to Tirana introduced by Goethe Institute as a good opportunity for Albanian producers to exchange experience.
The activity which brings in focus the relation of media with politics, will give Albanian media and television experts an opportunity to gain experience and to get known with international media productions and with international public media as well, to apply the main purpose of INPUT: “Television is a culture which helps us to know ourselves better, to understand better each – other and our respective cultures”. “This event must be considered as a way to inspire Albanian television producers in addition to improve public television broadcasting quality, not as a way to copy ideas,” says Brigitta Grau-Guenther, the director of the Goethe Institute in an interview for Deutsche Welle in the local Albanian service.
Another important question in the discussion was the challenge that public television is currently facing, the interference between commercial programs and the public-interested ones.
The television mission is getting more and more difficult each day, as the audience is preferring commercial programs which are easily found on the internet and this makes the television’s job more difficult and complicated. What television must immediately do is finding what the public is mostly interested in being informed, and bringing it with as much entertainment as possible to public.
Keeping the balance between commercial Television programs and the ones who are in public interest, the role of investigative journalism, the relationship between media and politics, finding new ways to show the story to public, are considered to be the challenges that television is currently going through.
In addition to improving the media freedom and its rights, investigative journalism was one of the most important issues of the discussion. In the MINI INPUT Tirana documentaries, held from April 16 to 17 at the Academy of Fine Art, the audience was given the opportunity to get to know with the importance of the investigative journalism as a decisive indicator of democracy in a country. “I think we have a considerable lack of investigative journalism, because this kind of journalism is expensive and nobody pays for it. Sometimes journalists make their own researches, but as long as public is not enough interested in this direction, it remains an incomplete mission,” says Maren Niemeyer, a media professional, part of INPUT organization.
The impact of politics in the media was one of the most important issues that INPUT was focused to discuss. According to Niemeyer, it is necessary finding a balance between media and politics to ensure the media freedom. The situation of press freedom in Albania is under threat, and immediate action is needed to prevent media from being censured and controlled by politicians. “Journalists should not allow politicians to manipulate them, and change the facts,” Niemeyer tells Deutsche Welle.
Discussion also focused on the importance of finding new innovative ways of telling the story to public. To show this came the documentary entitled “Hitler children” originally named ” Meine Familie, die Nazis und ich”, based on a personal story, which appeared inspiring and common to Albanian Communism dictatorship for Albanian audience. In the documentary came in a touching and realistic way, through a personal story, the difficulties of Nazi leader’s children, when they realized the ruling politics of their parents, and their sacrifices to get distant of them by going abroad, struggling to build a new life away from them.
INPUT 2013 will be held in Helsinki and Albanian investigative journalists in cooperation with television producers will have the chance to be part of this international event of television documentaries.