Intervista (Finding the Words)

Sala confronts his mother with her communist past. He found some soundless old footage containing an interview with his mother as member the communist youth. He takes the film to a school of deaf in Tirana, and with the help of lip readers, his mother’s words are deciphered. The brief film offers some poignant vignettes of contemporary life in Albania and also underscores the reluctance of Albanian’s former communist elite to confront its past. Sala’s work is at once achingly sensitive, unflinchingly brutal, and psychologically loaded.