When Tirana becomes a city of cinema: What remains after TIFF

The festival is over. The lights in the halls went out, the juries delivered their verdicts, the trophies made their way to the winners, and the filmmakers began to leave Tirana. But a film festival does not end with the awards ceremony. What remains after it is more than the list of winners.

In seven days, Tirana became a city where film did not stay only on the screen. It appeared in cinemas, in galleries, in open-air venues, in conversations, in masterclasses, in meetings between filmmakers, and in the evenings when people from different countries of the world sat at the same table.

From September 21 to 27, the 24th edition of the Tirana International Film Festival brought 229 films from 71 countries to the capital, while the festival had received more than 3,200 film submissions from 120 countries. In competition were 167 short films, alongside features, documentaries, animation, student films, and experimental forms.

But the numbers, however impressive, do not tell the whole story.

Because this year TIFF chose a question as its starting point: “Bring It Back! HUMANOGRAPHY” — bring the human back.

And in a way, that is also what happened during the festival.

The human returned to the center: the human who creates the film, the one who watches it, the one who judges it, the one who discusses it, and the one who, for a few days, comes from another country in the world to be part of a temporary community in Tirana.

HUMANOGRAPHY was not just a graphic slogan. TIFF’s program built it around ideas of identity, memory, connection, the need to belong, and the way cinema lets us see the reality of others. TIFForum placed the debate exactly there too: who tells the story, whose reality is seen, and where does the human remain in all of this?

A festival that took cinema out of one hall.

Another value of TIFF is the way it spread across the city. Millennium, Kino Piramida, Agimi Art Center, Maks Velo, Vila 31 x Art Explora, and Tunnel Terrace became different points on the same map.

This gave the festival another narrative: Tirana was not simply the place where TIFF took place. Tirana was part of TIFF.

In this edition, TIFF also gave a special place to the great history of Italian cinema. Under RetrospecTIFF, the festival paid homage to Luchino Visconti, bringing to the screen “Ossessione,” “Rocco and His Brothers,” and “The Innocent.” In collaboration with the Italian Institute of Culture, the program also extended into Tirana’s public space through the photography exhibition “The Italy We Dreamed Of,” a journey through roughly six decades of Italian cinema, from neorealism to Fellini.

The thing TIFF knows how to do best is not keeping cinema locked inside the hall.

The filmmakers and juries did not stay isolated inside the halls. They lived the city, met the audience, took part in discussions and masterclasses, and became part of an atmosphere that cannot be created through a film program alone.

Even the accreditation model itself had built the festival as a shared experience: screenings, discussions, masterclasses, workshops, industry events, networking, and festive evenings.

And that is where one of its greatest values lies.

The festival brings people together.

From Ukraine, Iran, Spain, and Greece — on the same jury

TIFF did not only build its program with international films. Its artistic decision-making was international too.

This edition’s juries included filmmakers, producers, distributors, actors, animators, curators, and industry professionals from Ukraine, Iran, Spain, Kosovo, Greece, Italy, Serbia, Montenegro, North Macedonia, Portugal, and other countries, alongside Albanian professionals.

In this mosaic were names like Alina Gorlova, Hoda Taheri, Nayra Sanz Fuentes, Giacomo Abbruzzese, John Canciani, Nikola Majdak, Bruno Carnide, Nik Xhelilaj, Dritan Huqi, Evi Gjoni, and many others.

Tirana became, for a few days, a place where Albanian and international filmmakers sat at the same table and spoke the same language: the language of film.

And behind all of this are the people.

A festival of this scale is not held only with big names.

Behind the screen are those who open the doors, guide the audience, accompany the filmmakers, check the halls, help with the organization, and make a complex program look simple to those who come to experience it.

Volunteers are an invisible but essential part of a festival. This year too, TIFF opened a special call for them, involving them in the life of the festival and offering them a volunteer certificate at the end.

In the end, a festival is also measured by this: how many people it manages to make feel part of it.

Agron Domi and a story approaching a quarter of a century

Behind TIFF is also a human story built over the years.

Agron Domi, the festival’s founder and director, started TIFF in 2003. Today, after 24 editions, the festival is one of the established cinema events in Albania and the region, with qualifying status for the Oscars and the European Film Awards.

One more year, and TIFF will touch the quarter century.

Twenty-five years is not just a number for a festival. It is a long story of persistence, work, changes, crises, generations of filmmakers, and an idea that has kept being kept alive: that Tirana can have a festival where film meets the world.

And today, as TIFF closed its 24th edition, this story seems closer than ever to its first great round figure.

From Tirana to the Oscars

Perhaps the strongest symbolism of this edition came at the end, with the award that can open a film’s path to cinema’s biggest stage.

“Flesh Impact,” Maggie Gyllenhaal’s short film, won “Best Short Film” at TIFF. Thanks to the festival’s status as an Academy Awards qualifying festival, this award makes the film eligible to be considered in the race for the Oscars’ short-film categories, if it also meets the Academy’s other criteria.

Thus, “Flesh Impact”‘s journey takes another direction: from Venice, where the film screened out of competition, to Tirana, where it entered the competition and won, and further toward the possibility of reaching the Oscars.

It is one of those moments showing that a festival is not only the place where films are screened and awards are handed out. It can also be an important station in their international journey. And in this case, that station was Tirana.

They say the greatest success is in simple things. At the end of a festival, films, awards, and photographs remain.

But the memories of those who were there remain too.

A filmmaker who saw Tirana for the first time. A jury member who sat at a city restaurant with colleagues from four different countries. A student who saw their first film at an international festival. A volunteer who for a week lived from the inside a world they had until yesterday seen only on screen. A spectator who discovered a new auteur.

And perhaps that is exactly where TIFF’s greatest value lies.

It brings the world to Tirana and puts Tirana before the world.

For a week, filmmakers, juries, producers, students, volunteers, industry professionals, and cinephiles became part of the same story.

A story that began in 2003, that this year reached its 24th edition, and that next year will enter another chapter: 25 years of TIFF.

And if this year’s slogan was “Bring It Back! HUMANOGRAPHY,” then what remains after the festival can be said even more simply:

Bring it back. Bring people together. Bring cinema to Tirana.

And Tirana, for seven days, was exactly where it had to be: at the center of cinema.