“Azizi” is a film based on the testimonies of the survivors from the Enverist regime’s internment camps. It had its premiere last week in Kinema Millennium.
Producer and screenwriter Luljeta Progni, who is also a journalist, tells us the film narrates the real story of Aziz Ndreu, a survivor who spent his whole life in the camps of Kuçova, Berat, Turan and Tepelena.
In the spring of 1948, 14-year-old Aziz is interned to a camp together with his mother and sisters.
The communist regime deported from their homes thousands families, mainly children, women and old people, most of which were never to return to their birthplace. One of them is Aziz, the main character in the film, who narrates the events in the camps of Kuçova, Berat, Turan and Tepelena.
Aziz experiences the deaths of hundreds of children from starvation and diseases, his mother’s demise, as well as the daily life among the interned living under conditions of mere survival.
At the Tepelena internment camp, after an accident at work while transporting wood in the mountain, Aziz is taken for treatment to the nursery, where he is later assigned a nursing assistant. The white scrubs bring him closer to the suffering of the interned, whom he helps as much as he can.
Left alone after the closing of the camp, Aziz takes off the white scrubs and carries on with his internment far away from his birthplace for 37 years more, until the collapse of the communist regime. The film ends with the birth of Aziz’s first child in a shack, while still in internment – a hope that in an interview Aziz considers as ‘lost’.”
Throughout the whole 90 minutes the story is narrated without changing any names or the chronology of events. Characters in the film hold their real names. Events and dialogues taking place among characters are also narrated as they are recorded in their memory. Similarly, the setting is based on actual artifacts of the time.
The film shot in camps’ remaining comes as a modest contribution to commemorate the lives of thousands of Albanians who died in the internment camps of the communist dictatorship.
“Aziz” was supported by the Konrad Adenauer Foundation in Tirana. A valuable contribution was given by citizens of Shkodra and Berat who played the roles of Aziz and other victims of the internment camps.
