Secrets
 
An ordinary man in a waist of fate becomes protagonist in the drama of the change of political systems. Trying to get away from this protagonism he abandons every relationships with human kind and befriends a dog in which he finds himself.

Synopsis

A city neighborhood is kept away during the night by wild and frightening barks. They do not come from a dog thought, but from a lonely inhabitant of that city, a construction engineer named Landi. After being report by neighbors, he is sent to a psychiatric ward. There, a doctor try to discover the causes of such a state of mind and, through Landi’s retrospective confession, the fate of the common individual who is crushed, lifted up and then brought down again by the change of socio-political systems, systems which do not give him a chance to express his own identity. Out of this chaos, the individual emerges lonely and he accidentally stumbles upon a dog that is lost by its owner. As it turns out, this dog belongs to a foreign embassy and a semi – Mafioso group are looking for it, for their own interests. Unable to protect himself during all his life, Landi insistently protects the dog, his only true friend. It is during this existential endeavor that he swaps roles with the dog and in a climactic moment of that struggle, he performs his dramatic bark. In Landi’s story the doctor traces step by step his own story as well as that of hundred of thousands of his transition generation peers. It is only natural than that, in the end, he joins his patient’s barking, as a sad night ends and a new day begins with a suspicious dawn.

DIRECTOR NOTE

Barking through the is a movie about the Albanian madness, the madness of a nation that has not been able to express itself, to criticize, to think for itself or even have different dreams from the ones that were imposed by a totalitarian ideology for fifty years. A nation that has only lived through communist dictator Enver Hoxha’s slogans.

This historical reality has been one of my main artistic concerns and was also at the core of two of my previous films: The Rapists and Life after death.
Barking through the night will therefore be the third part of trilogy, and will specifically approach the idea of a nation in chaos, unable to find a new starting point since the dictator’s fall.
Albania is still governed by the elite of the former communist dictatorship and, for the reasone, the situation remains partly the same: the interest of this elite is to not reveal the secrets of the past and the population’s traumas, on the contrary. From there, the essential idea for me is that the madness remains, for they have literally hit on peoples brains. And they are still suffering after the fall of the dictatorship as they did during the years of oppressions. They are as mad inside as they are outside of the hospital.
Facing the madness is the lady doctor, who represents the new generation, the one that believes in the possibility to get out of the alienation, to cure the population by discovering the secrets of people, to understand the truth and wash the past from it’s pain and traumas. In order to turn themselves to the future, eventually.

But to open the secrets boxes, men need some time. Our characters will be confronting his quest throughout the story of the film, leading us to this essential question: what can be done with the memory of the nation? To be able to turn to the future, is the duty of memory necessary or, no the contrary, should we destroy what makes the terrible story of a nation?

The toppling of Enver Hoxha’s statue is the beginning of the story, when both angry and moved, the population gathers up to bring the system down. A system of terror, a system of violence, the craziest system in Europe.

Barking through the night is asking this essential question for my country: what about the Albanian’s fate once the dictatorship fell? Have the Albanians been lost by the dictatorship or have they been ontologically, culturally alienated since they were born? For fifty years of oppression leave a trace of such depth that the population, once freed, reminds deeply unable to get hold of its destiny. It reminds blind, insane, mad, lost and goes from a state of terror to a state of chaos.

In this omnipresent madness, Landi barks like a dog because he lost his own humanity. The story tells about this paradox: Landi will eventually say that the had never been himself until the moment he locked himself up with Xhelal and felt that this dog had a more human and caring relationship with him than all the other men he had met in his life. Barking had become for him both a sign of a madness and a sign of an identity, which he somehow eventually stumbled upon.
To get over this madness, to eventually stop his barking, Landi will have a long way to go, the one of the testimony, the one of the confession: go back through his story to really get out of it, to lose his barking and come back among mankind.

Thus, through Landi’s story, Barking through the night intends to open, with all modesty, the box of secrets of a country by imagining the direction the next generations could take, proposing it not a solution, at least a connection to the world, a vigilance, the necessary reappropriation of oneself. And this realization obviously needs an effort to the duty of memory that the next generation will be able to make same day. If the lady doctor eventually comes to the pessimistic conclusion that the country is not ready to listen to the testimonies she accumulated, her action has not been useless: it arrived too soon but it will be necessary that it gets thoroughly accomplished same day.

The film will be both a psychological drama and an allegorical film. The relationship between Landi, the main character who barks like a dog, and Xhelal, the dog he finds, is obviously to consider as a metaphor. Both characters are treated as equals, to such an extent that when they meet, neither of them saves the other. Then, step by step, the relationship changes, as Landi detaches himself from the dog to move towards himself, to his past, to his humanity. Thus the stopover at Landi’s mother’s fulfills its function: through the pictures she shows her guests, Landi’s mother reactivates the long-buried past of her son, she shows the most common reality: his story as a man, the traces both unique and universal of his past.

Thereby the importance of the dog Xhelal will change. He will subsequently become the possibility of a passport for France, a means to leave this mad country and try one’s luck somewhere else. This new dimension is not an artificial way to introduce some danger inside the story. The fact that he belongs to the French ambassador’s wife allows Xhelal to literally give a new direction. As he had done with Landi by giving him – temporarily – a new identity, he can now give Shiti and his men hope of a new life. Therefore, the end shows that there is not much difference between the patients of the mental hospital and the people outside, who are going after the pursuit of their travel and absurd dream.

The escape of Landi, the doctor, the lady doctor and Veronika from the mental hospital gives the possibility of a  deliverance. Indeed the group gets away from the institutions, from the city, from the frame of the Albanian reality and they live, during this very escapade, a new order, both transient and happy. At that point of the story, the character share the same sensitivity, they equally condemn the violence and the brutality of a system from which they eventually escaped. But above all, they are able to same their secrets.

This escape to an unknown direction will give the film the dimension of a roadmovie, which will become the characters’ initiation journey that will give them the insight of who they are and of their own story. The contact with wilderness brings them new sensation both simple and naïve, liked with the innocence of an utopia: the one of an Albanian to build, free and desalinated. It is in this very magical  moment, nearby the river Lana, that the characters will be able to feel and live the world in a straight, serene and loving relationship.

The relationship between the landscape and the sky builds this essential space that has been missing for years, stifled for near half a century by the most brutal and violent political regime in Europe. A space of harmony and reconciliation with oneself.

The ruined church will be the last part of the journey, the final stage of the escapade: a paradoxical spiritual moment in a long abandoned church. Through. Landi and Veronika’s wedding, the characters reintroduce the necessity of ritual, they get in contact with an archaic and transcendental culture. It will also be the perfect place for the doctor. And this ia what the film under the dictatorship into something bearable, whatever role – active or passive – one had.

Past and present are intertwined throughout the whole dramatic development of the story: penetrate the past will allow to take the future on – as for Landi – and the future will allow to accept the past – as with the doctor’s redemption who takes hold of his destiny and saves Landi and veronica. If this action does not cancel his fault, it takes him out of his passive and fatalistic apathy and gives his character the possibility again to struggle against the established order.

At the end of the story, the character will obviously not be able to change their country’s conscience. But still, the film will not end on a licking : if they can no revolutionize the people’s conscience, they would have been able to understand their own state of mind, and realize their alienation, imagine new dreams, with new ideals. This journey will have changed them above all.

The elements of this problematic issue will dictate me the necessities of the direction with various elements: style, photography, light, music and the direction of actors. Although the issue of the film is deeply committed and serious, the style will alternate dramatic moments and comical situations. Thus, some specific situations are willingly absurd or comical, through dialogues or gestures: when Landi runs away barking from the hospital, when he tries to understand Veronika and her amnesia, when Shiti and his men try to get in the church, and eventually, when, in the flashbacks, Landi receives a medal twice – once for taking part of the construction of the tyrant’s statue, the second time for taling part of it’s sabotage. . .

The film will be mostly shot with a handheld camera, to keep a proximity with the character – shot mostly in close-up inside the hospital to reinforce the impression of imprisonment – and a direct frontal shooting, with a messy impression, in adequacy with the characters’ madness.

The flashbacks that are sprinkled in the film will be shot with natural light shades, whereas the image of the mental hospital episodes will be particularly saturated, and shot with a wide angle.

The music will have an important part in this film. It will bring either suspense and violence when Landi is in danger during the flashbacks (when the frenzied crawd is bringing the statue down, for example), either melodramatic in the intimate moments (the doctor’s loneliness when thinking of his past, or when Landi and Veronika meet, etc.). From the escape on, the music will become more sensitive and fragile, alternating obviously with the ciolent music of the past that goes on in the flashbacks.

At last, the sound will be for me an important element: sounds and noises wil put the film in an in-betweens state: between reality and madness, between delirium and real. The sounds are the ones that << hit >> the human brains, punctually coming back as a nightmare, distorted and treated, on the direct opposite of the << nature >> sounds that the character will meet along through their journey.

The message remains open: it is important to imagine the possibility of a change.

In the final scene, the laughter of the four characters will cover the whole country of Albania, it will be heard everywhere, even by newborn babies. From barking to laughing: Landi has found his humanity back in the Albanian night.

Spartak Pecani