Who was in 1973 the Albanian writer Fatos Lubonja when he was a little more twenty, before his 17 years incarceration in a gulag as a dissident? And who is him, today, in 2023, a little more seventy, thirty years after his liberation? What is the balance of his life?
The film aims to recall the different seasons of Fatos Lubonja’s life, from a young opponent of the communist regime of Enver Hoxha to a dissident voice both from the post-communist Albania of Sali Berisha - in the phase of the Transition - that of the dull and corrupt Demokratura of its current leader Edi Rama. The crucial answer of the film will be: which is the deep nature of the idea of Democracy and freedom? So, in other words, what remains of what Fatos Lubonja was when he was twenty, before and during his incarceration in a communist concentration camp? And what remains of what it has become forty years, after its liberation, in the transition of Albania from dictatorship to democracy? How does the vision of the possibilities that life offers to a young adult in a concentration camp change, 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?
Giorgio Colangeli