The Forgiveness of Blood

Modern world clashes with ancient law in Albania in the dark 'The Forgiveness of Blood'

By BETSY SHARKEY (Los Angeles Times)

LOS ANGELES -- "The Forgiveness of Blood," a dark saga about the clash of modern times and ancient traditions in rural Albania, is more a story of whispers when cries are what's called for with lives, livelihoods and family honor on the line.

The eye-for-an-eye price of settling such disputes, and the hope of a new generation to escape the sins of their fathers, drives cowriter-director Joshua Marston's fitful new film.

Though Marston is once again rooting around in the harsh realities of cultural mores, particularly for the young, the movie lacks the emotional jolt of his splendid "Maria Full of Grace" in 2004. For the pregnant Columbian teen in "Maria," it was both the escape promised and the toll exacted of being a drug mule. For Nik (Tristan Halilaj), the young Albanian in the middle of "Forgiveness," it is the repercussions of his father's fight, one that leaves the teenager a virtual prisoner in his own home.The film opens with the contrasting realities of Nik's life. He's a typical teenager, finishing up high school, obsessing over his looks, flirting with a classmate. He's also the oldest son, helping his father, Mark (Refet Abazi), hitch an ox to the wagon, which is both the family's main source of income and its only transportation. His father's days are spent delivering fresh-baked bread around the village, while Nik spends his texting friends, retooling computers and dreaming of opening an Internet cafe.

Art/Movie and Theater

Stevens to play Albanian hero at 100th celebration
By Lisa Millegan

http://www.modbee.com/

Modesto tenor honored by role
Roy Stevens is not Albanian and has no ancestors who are. Yet the Modesto tenor will play the Eastern European country's national hero in an opera for the country's 100th anniversary celebration.

He will portray the title role in "Skanderbeg" in the capital city of Tirana in 2012.

Stevens said he was as surprised as anyone to be offered the part.

"Can you imagine the U.S. choosing a foreigner to play George Washington or Abe Lincoln in a national celebration?" he said.

Art/Movie and Theater

Albania pairs up for film biz

Tiny nation leans on co-prod'ns to boost profile

By NICK HOLDSWORTH Variety Magazine

TIRANA, Albania -- The tiny Balkans country -- where thousands of egg-shaped concrete gun emplacements and bunkers still disfigure the land, a reminder of the paranoia of the past -- is pushing hard for European Union membership, with some 90% of the population behind it.

That may be a long way off -- even with support from southerly neighbor and EU member Greece.

But filmmakers in a country where cinema all but collapsed in the last 20 years have a secret weapon: Eurimages.

Art/Movie and Theater

Cannes - Movie Review

The Dardennes film ‘Le silence de Lorna’
Source: www.european-films.net

The double Palme d’Or winners Luc and Jean-Pierre Dardenne came to Cannes with their sixth fiction feature film in their native Belgium. The film is called Le silence de Lorna (Lorna’s Silence) and stars regular Dardenne leading man Jérémie Renier, Italo-Belgian actor Fabrizio Rongione and young Kosovar-Albanian actress Arta Dobroshi, who first came to attention in Kujtim Çashku’s Albanian feature Syri magjik (Magic Eye) from 2005.

Rongione and Renier both starred in films by another Belgian talent, Joachim Lafosse, last year; Rongione in Ça rend heureux (What Makes You Happy), which he co-wrote, and Jérémie alongside his older brother Yannick Renier and French diva Isabelle Huppert in Lafosse's Nue propriété (Private Property). Rongione also had bit parts in two earlier Dardenne films and recently wrapped Ariel Zeitoun's Le dernier gang (The Last Gang).

Art/Movie and Theater

Fable as History: the Macedonian Context
Victor A. Friedman
University of Chicago

One of the first reactions I had when watching Before the Rain was a sense of disorientation, since I recognized the various churches and monasteries that were edited together to produce the effect of a single location (cf. Brown 1998: 169). At the end, as I left the theatre with the Albanian friend who had suggested that we see the film, which had just opened in New York, I was deeply moved and impressed, but also deeply disturbed at the thought that American audiences would take it as a kind of documentary about the Yugoslav Wars of Succession that were then still being fought rather than as a cautionary fable set in Macedonia. My Albanian friend agreed with me, and several weeks later Macedonian friends of mine in Chicago voiced the same misgivings when the topic of conversation turned to Before the Rain. In this essay, I shall contextualize some of the historical and political narratives and cultural practices that the film draws on to achieve its creative force.

Art/Movie and Theater

Nga YouTube tek Spilberg
nga Altin Topi
Shekulli Shkurt 2007

YouTube u zgjodh nga revista amerikane Time si ngjarja me perfaqesuese per vitin 2006. Koncepti i YouTube eshte sa i vecante po aq i thjeshte. YouTube automatizoi te gjitha aspektet teknike te hulumtimit te vidionet-it; njerezit me nje klikim mund te shikojne qindra-mijra vidiot e hedhura nga individe diletante qe duan te ndajne eksperiencat e tyre filmike, vidoklipet personale, me mbare globin. C’ka eshte me e rendesishme eshte se YouTube thjeshtezoi hedhjen e vidoklipeve ne net, ne disa klikime te cilat mundesuan anashkalimin e cdo aspekti teknik dikur te komplikuar, e qe kerkonte profesionalizem. Te hedhesh nje vidioklipin tend ne YouTube(www.youtube.com), mjafton te hapesh nje llogari te tenden, me nje klikim tjeter te kalosh ne faqen ku behet hedhja e vidioklipit, te shenosh(hapesh) dosjen tende kibernetike, e me nje klikim te fundit, te besh hedhjen e materialit ne cfaredo formati.

Art/Movie and Theater

Before the Rain
Altin Topi
Alb-Club Feb 2000

In his first debut as film director of “Before the Rain", Milcho Manchevski, is extremely unpredictable in telling the story. He even doesn't try to find any explanation for such immutability of hatred and violence overwhelming dramatically the two neighboring settlements, the Macedonian christians and Albanian moslems. For him it looks as the best way to approach the story.

Everything starts and ends at the same point - “before the rain". The metaphoric rain and the sophisticated narrative style of the new director leave the audience during all the sequences of the film in a perplexity, sometimes in front of a puzzle full of paradoxes.

Art/Movie & Theater

All you need for a movie is a gun and a girl.
Altin Topi
Alb-Club August 2001

Who can be the author of such wisdom, - the title of this miniature essay, - other than Jean-Luc Godard? The "Band of Outsiders", or translated in other words "Tres Bon Bonnie and her Clydes", is reissued these days with a new print and subtitles, being a masterpiece of mood, nuance and emotions. It is playing at Film Forum in Manhattan, New York City.

Once Godard said that he made the film to "sell a lot of tickets", but he didn't. All his films were unable to sell a lot of tickets. Apart of this, his films didn't disappear in the timeless oblivion, and as this gangsters' film of French smell, it rose from the ashes and dust of time and arrived at the Film Forum with a catalog's worth of movie geek ephemera. Quentin Tarantino himself adopted its name to "A Band Apart" for his production company and as per Godard himself: "Tarantino named his production company after one of my films. He'd have done better to give me some money."