Photo exhibition brings 20th-century Italian cinema to Tirana

From today until October 23, in the space in front of the Central State Film Archive, passers-by will be able to see the photo exhibition “L’Italia che sognavamo”, with photographs drawn from 20th-century Italian cinematography.

The exhibition comes as a collaboration between the Italian Cultural Institute, the Italian Embassy in Tirana, the municipality of Cesena and the Malatestiana Library, curated by Brunella Garavini (Malatestiana Library, Cesena) and Elton Koritari (EjAlbum).

“Twentieth-century Italian cinema is not simply a collection of films: it is the greatest exercise in looking that a country has ever made at itself. From the road of Neorealism to the dreams of Fellini, this is a journey in which the lens changes its nature twice,” writes curator Elton Koritari.

He explains that what is exhibited is precisely the Italy that Albanians watched, almost blinded, during the darkness of the dictatorship and, at the same time, the very mechanism that produced that blindness.

For entire generations of Albanians, Italian cinema and television were a forbidden window looking out on the other shore of the Adriatic. Seventy kilometres of sea and a secretly picked-up television signal were all that divided and united the two peoples. Italy, before it was a destination, was an image: bright, desired, dreamed of.

The photographs in the exhibition testify to the transformation of Italian society, seen not only on celluloid, but also from behind the scenes.