The Albanian

Colour, 35 mm
Germany, Albania, 2010, 104 min
Section: East of the West - Films in Competition

Synopsis

Arben is a young Albanian mountain-dweller who occasionally crosses the border into neighbouring Greece, returning to his native village with money to help support his large family. When he finds out, however, that his secret love Etleva is expecting a baby and that her parents are demanding 10,000 EUR from him for the wedding, Arben sets off for distant Germany in search of bigger wages. Coming from a poor environment, he suddenly finds himself in the land of the affluent. But the "European dream” cherished by this illegal immigrant, now stuck in a country with no friends, experience or knowledge of the language, soon turns into a nightmare. The pledge to return within a few months with the required sum of money is fraught with all kinds of obstacles. In order to get what he wants, the naïve young man has to pay a high price.... In his socio-critical drama, debuting director Johannes Naber envisages his native Germany as a world which has no place for integrity, morality or innocence, at least not for young illegal immigrants.

About the director

Johannes Naber (b. 1971, Baden-Baden) studied philosophy and philology in Berlin. He graduated in documentary film direction from the Baden-Württemberg Film Academy in Ludwigsburg in 1999. In 1995 he began working as a television and film gaffer. In 1999 he made the short film Popstar, and for television he shot the feature-length documentary Anfassen erlaubt (2005) and the short feature Der Zweifel (2008). In 2009 he was awarded the German Film Critics Association Award for his involvement in the screenplay for the historical drama North Face (Nordwand, 2008, dir. Philipp Stölzl). The psychological drama The Albanian is his feature film debut, screened in competition at the Moscow IFF.