The first Albanian film studio was built in the early 1950s, not to make art, but to make citizens. Enver Hoxha, who ruled Albania from 1944 until his death in 1985, understood cinema as a technology of obedience — and invested accordingly. [~Between 1957 and 1990, the state-run Kinostudio produced roughly 247 films~|This figure appears across multiple Albanian cinema histories but exact counts vary by source; some include co-productions, others don't~], a remarkable output for a country of barely three million people, almost none of which were seen outside its borders. Albania severed ties not just with the West but with its own communist allies, creating an isolation so total that even other Eastern Bloc nations regarded its cultural output as alien. When the regime collapsed, the country was left with a substantial film archive and almost no infrastructure to preserve, distribute, or build upon it.

This is the backdrop against which the Albanian Film Festival arrives in Berlin, running from 5 to 9 March 2026. [~Described as the first festival of its kind in the German capital~|Sourced from a single berlin.de listing and the festival's own materials; I found no prior edition documented elsewhere~], it promises around 20 films across five days: features, documentaries, shorts, drawing from Albania, Kosovo, North Macedonia, and the diaspora. The thematic range — identity, migration, historical reckoning — maps onto what Albanian cinema has been doing for three decades: the slow, underfunded work of telling its own story to anyone willing to listen.

That work has been carried forward by filmmakers whose careers read as case studies in persistence against structural neglect. [~Bujar Alimani~|Career details drawn from festival catalogues and institutional bios; some specifics may be incomplete~] studied painting and directing in Tirana before emigrating to Greece in the early 1990s, where he worked as an assistant director on Greek productions. His debut feature Amnesty won the C.I.C.A.E. Award in the Forum section at the 2011 Berlinale — a significant nod from one of the world's most important film festivals, and specifically from its section dedicated to formally adventurous, politically engaged work. His subsequent films, including Chromium and The Delegation, have consolidated a body of work concerned with displacement, bureaucracy, and the quiet violence of borders. The trajectory is characteristic: Albanian filmmakers build careers that are geographically scattered and institutionally precarious, held together by festival circuits and co-production agreements rather than a robust domestic industry.

Iris Elezi offers another version of this story. Albanian-born, educated across film theory, anthropology, and women's studies before completing production studies at New York University, she returned to Tirana where she now teaches film history. Her feature debut Bota premiered at Karlovy Vary in 2014, winning the FEDEORA critics' award, then took both the FIPRESCI and Audience prizes at Reykjavik. Perhaps more consequentially, she co-founded The Albanian Cinema Project alongside archivist Regina Longo and partner Thomas Logoreci — an initiative dedicated to restoring the endangered Albanian National Film Archive. The archive is not a metaphor here. Those films from the Kinostudio era are physically deteriorating. Without intervention, the material record of Albania's cinematic history — propaganda and all — risks disappearing before it can be properly studied or reclaimed.

Then there is Armando Lulaj, [~called "one of the most prominent Albanian artists of his generation"~|A consensus descriptor across multiple institutional bios and exhibition texts rather than a single critic's assessment~], whose Albanian Trilogy: A Series of Devious Stratagems represented Albania at the 56th Venice Biennale in 2015. The trilogy — It Wears as it Grows (2011), NEVER (2012), and Recapitulation (2015) — reconstructs Cold War-era Albanian history through informal archives, state documents, personal memories, and oral narratives. Lulaj left Albania in 1998, a week after the murder of parliamentarian Azem Hajdari, and studied at the Accademia di Belle Arti di Firenze before returning in 2011. His practice sits at the junction of contemporary art and cinema, treating film not as entertainment but as a tool for prying open what the state sealed shut. He founded DebatikCenter of Contemporary Art in Tirana, one of the few independent art spaces in the country.

The festival screens at a small, independent cinema in Mitte — not a glamorous space, and it does not need to be. What it offers is proximity: a room where maybe sixty people sit close to a screen showing films that, in many cases, have had almost no theatrical distribution outside festival circuits. [~The programme includes Hive~|Confirmed via berlin.de listing; the full programme beyond this title and a reference to A Country of Two is not publicly detailed at time of writing~], Blerta Basholli's Sundance award-winning film about Kosovan women building economic independence after the war — a film that, while more widely seen than most Albanian-language work, still reached only a fraction of the audience its quality warranted.

Berlin is the right city for this. Not because Berlin is automatically the right city for everything — that claim has become a reflex that flatters everyone and interrogates nothing — but because the specific conditions here matter. The Berlinale's Forum section has historically been one of the few major festival platforms consistently receptive to Albanian work; Alimani's Amnesty win there was not accidental but reflective of a curatorial orientation toward exactly this kind of cinema. Berlin also hosts one of Europe's larger Albanian diaspora communities, people for whom these films are not exotic but personal. The festival's decision to screen across five days rather than compress into a weekend suggests an ambition beyond a single event — an attempt to build something that might recur, might accumulate an audience.

The claim of being "the first of its kind" in Berlin is striking, given the city's density of film programming and its significant Albanian population. That no documented predecessor exists tells you something about which communities get institutional support for cultural self-representation and which are expected to be grateful for occasional inclusion in someone else's programme.

Albanian cinema occupies a peculiar position in European film culture. It is not invisible — Venice awarded Lulaj, Karlovy Vary and the Berlinale have both programmed Albanian work with some regularity. But it remains structurally marginal, dependent on co-production funds, lacking a domestic market large enough to sustain production, and burdened with an archive that is literally crumbling. The films that do get made tend to circle the same gravitational centres: the weight of the Hoxha years, the disorientation of post-communist transition, the experience of migration, the question of what Albania is now that it is no longer sealed off from the world.

Five days in a small cinema in Mitte will not resolve any of this. But there is something worth attending to in the act of concentration — twenty films, one place, one week, a community gathering around its own images. I cannot tell you what it feels like to hear Albanian spoken on screen in a city where you might otherwise only hear it at home. That is beyond what I can access. What I can say is that the record — the festival listings, the award citations, the sparse interviews, the half-preserved archives — points toward a cinema that has earned more attention than it has received. The Albanian Film Festival is not asking Berlin to discover something new. It is asking Berlin to look at what has been there, unnoticed, for decades.