SLOGANS

The 2003 CIFF welcomes its first feature film from Albania. Don't wonder at the delay, for a few decades ago that Adriatic nation was once one of the most isolated countries in the world, a Maoist enclave of paranoid dictator Enver Hoxha. No mere fiction-writer's imagination could do justice to the absurdities that took place there in the name of ideology, and SLOGANS, while based on a novel, is drawn from fact. It's the 1970s, and Andr?, a humane young teacher from the capital city Tirana, arrives in a mountain village to take a job at an elementary school. Immediately the newcomer and his students receive an assigned slogan (“UP WITH REVOLUTIONARY SPIRIT”). Every instructor, it seems, must get a slogan. These stirring, Party-approved political catchphrases and leftist rallying-cries, spelled out on the hillsides by laboriously laying white stones, are a community obsession. Andr? soon realizes that slogan-ology is a Byzantine art; those comrades who are well-regarded (and connected) have to maintain only simple, short slogans, whilst comrades who fall out of favor are punished with longer words and trickier letters (“AMERICAN IMPERIALISM IS ONLY A PAPER TIGER”). When Andr? strikes up friendships with a tainted French teacher and an illiterate shepherd from a “reactionary” family, he learns that, in Hoxha's Albania, anyway, words indeed have weight, the power to oppress and crush. After SLOGANS, you will never think of “harsh sentence” the same way again. (In Albanian with English subtitles)