The village performs. Representations and realities of the villages of socialist Albania

Shoqa nga Fshati (Companion from the village, 1980) is a film by Piro Milkani set in the 1970s. lt tells the story of Teta Olga's journey from an arrogant attitude towards the village to a companion who fights tor the toundations of its modernisation. This transformation is fundamental to understanding how, tor the Albanian socialist ideology, modernisation and villages went hand in hand. The corpus of films produced by Klnostudio between 1954 and 1990 allows us to understand the aesthetic, narrative and spatial structure of a process of invention. These films tell of the intense process of conquest, of idyllic and pastoral lite, and of the emancipation, equality and freedom of its inhabitants. Furthermore, the observation of what remains of the actual places used tor the scenes in the films allows us to describe them beyond the idyllic socialist narrative and to trace the post-socialist transtormations.