Who is he?

Dhimitër Anagnosti is one of Albania's best-known filmmakers. His works deal with the society of his country, in particular the condition of young women. This is hardly surprising given that Anagnosti was Minister of Culture, Youth and Sport in the 1990.

His film at the Lumière film festival

A Tale from the Past is a humorous story. To avoid working in the fields, a man agrees to marry off his fourteen-year-old son to a twenty-year-old woman, who will plough the land for him. The problem is the young woman is in love with a man her own age. Nevertheless, the wedding must go on !

A Tale from the Past, 1987 © DR

Why is it worth discovering?

A Tale from the Past is a wonderful film, deeply original and made with a real sense of fun to denounce an aberrant patriarchal rural society. With patience and a deliberate sense of seriousness, Anagnosti makes a movie that mixes the face-value nature of the stubborn and ignorant society of a small village community with humour beyond the nice and poetic, with the sweet and clever exchanges between the two husbands, the fourteen-year-old boy and the twenty-year-old woman. In order to alter an untenable reality, the director shows how his characters have no choice but to lie. Showing young people lying to denounce the excesses of a society is a real risk when you consider that the film was shot in Albania in 1987, still part of the Soviet bloc.