Mbaj Mende (A meeting with Fatos Lubonja)
LOGLINE
Who was the Albanian writer Fatos Lubonja when he was twenty, before his incarceration in a gulag as a dissident? And who is him, today, thirty years after his liberation? What is the balance of his life?
Synopsis:
A portrait of the Albanian writer and intellectual Fatos Lubonja, sentenced to 17 years in prison by Enver Hohxa (1973-1991). In the film, Lubonja crosses the infinite rooms of the monumental residence of the Albanian dictator in Tirana: recalling fragments of his own history, in the frame of the history of communist and post-communist Albania. The shootings are alternated with those of the ruins of the Spac gulag and with those of Lubonja’s Italian home on the Tuscan hills in Calci (Pisa), where the writer spends several months a year, supplemented by his personal photo archive, which recalls the different seasons of his life: from a young opponent of the communist regime to a dissident voice both from the first post-communist Albania of Sali Berisha and from the current dull and corrupt Demokratura of Edi Rama.
Director: Stefano Grossi
Country: Italy
Expected running: 52’/70′
Screenplay: Stefano Grossi
Editing: Luca Mandrile
Cinematography: Angelo Santovito
Production: Fargo Entertainment Srl, Filmrouge Coop arl, OwnAir Srl
Producer: Luisa Porrino, Angelo Santovito, Alfredo Borrelli
Estimated budget: to be definited
Financing in place: to be definited
Gap financing: to be definited
Looking for: co-production, acquisition, pre-purchases
Shooting: july 2021
End of shooting: july 2023
Director’s statement:
What remains of what Fatos Lubonja was when he was twenty, after his incarceration in a gulag? And what remains of what it has become when he was forty, after its liberation, in the difficult transition of Albania from dictatorship to democracy? How does the vision of the possibilities that life offers to a young man in a country crushed by a dictatorship? And how does the vision of an adult’s life change when he has experienced those possibilities in his new existence as a free citizen of a democratic country?
BIOGRAPHY
Born in Milan in 1963. Author of short films, feature films and documentaries, premiered in various festivals. Translator and Italian editor of several books on cinema for Gremese, Lindau, Marcos Y Marcos. He has held seminars on Filmology and History of Cinema at the University of Genoa.
PRODUCTION Fargo Entertainment Srl, Filmrouge Coop arl, OwnAir Srl | PRODUCER Luisa Porrino (Fargo), Angelo Santovito (Filmrouge), Alfredo Borrelli (OwnAir) | CONTACTS filmrougeproduzioni@gmail.com, +39 3391366852