This is an essay based on a topic of my choice. It is the first of a few ones to come, just wanted to be sure I am on the right track :) If someone could also help me with the 'cutting out' of unnecessary words or sentences - this first draft exceeds the proposed limit by 54 words.
"The pictures behind my bed-time stories"
Somehow, I had never been very fond of movies. I liked the occasional masterpiece that conveyed a message related to some passions of mine or the latest franchise that related to a book I had spent my childhood with. It is not that I was averse to art, on the contrary. It was just that I rarely had the patience to watch a movie to its full extend, they were sometimes to person, or, as was always the case with Albanian movies, they just seemed to portray the same stories, enveloped with different titles.
Because living in Albania means growing up listening to your mother's bedtime "fairytales" about the bloody revenges that still take innocent lives on the north, of the long lines at 5 AM during the Communist era or the conditions that push thousands to illegal immigration. Contemporary problems, or historical realities that make up a considerable part of my formal and informal education were portrayed en masse in most Albanian movies. An almost unhealthy nostalgia that made me averse to national cinematography. And this is why, it was always with passionate scepticism that I followed my friends to their discovery of the latest Albanian franchise.
Yet, if there was something I learned during my life is to never underestimate the power of art to surprise you. I ignored this piece of common-knowledge and forgot that stereotypes are not made to live within humans and their versatile psychology. I sat more than once on the fifth row of the small cinema, unknowingly waiting for what was to be the turning point of the opinion I retained about movies and their individuality. Each time a new story. I looked at the screen, I heard the voice of an actor speaking in broken German, witnessed the pain of a couple divided by political decisions of a suffocating systems and a student's life turned upside down by a senseless vendetta.
I watched the same films more than once. I looked again at the screen with the same awe of a child discovering for the first time a truth he had consciously ignored. We had all discussed these problems in Sociology classes, reprimanding the sometime perpetual necessity of a lost generation to turn back the time and find a way to make their future easier to live. I pretended to understand yet refused to accept their pain. And it was in that dark room one afternoon that it came to me : in Albanian cinematography I so much distrusted I had found the pictures behind my bed-time stories, made me realise that every life has its own history to tell and not two sufferance are the same.
Nowadays, though I still feel a little bit reluctant when invited over to watch a movie, my attitude has changed. Old habits die hard, but thankfully new ideas are even easier to become part of your life. That piece Albanian culture I had rejected turned into my guideline into deciphering the individual destinies of a population I shared but the blood with. Do I know everything now? Of course I don't. Those films were but the beginning of understanding the past and present of something I am a small part of. Because one thing I know for sure : there is no human being to be understood without its identity.
"The pictures behind my bed-time stories"
Somehow, I had never been very fond of movies. I liked the occasional masterpiece that conveyed a message related to some passions of mine or the latest franchise that related to a book I had spent my childhood with. It is not that I was averse to art, on the contrary. It was just that I rarely had the patience to watch a movie to its full extend, they were sometimes to person, or, as was always the case with Albanian movies, they just seemed to portray the same stories, enveloped with different titles.
Because living in Albania means growing up listening to your mother's bedtime "fairytales" about the bloody revenges that still take innocent lives on the north, of the long lines at 5 AM during the Communist era or the conditions that push thousands to illegal immigration. Contemporary problems, or historical realities that make up a considerable part of my formal and informal education were portrayed en masse in most Albanian movies. An almost unhealthy nostalgia that made me averse to national cinematography. And this is why, it was always with passionate scepticism that I followed my friends to their discovery of the latest Albanian franchise.
Yet, if there was something I learned during my life is to never underestimate the power of art to surprise you. I ignored this piece of common-knowledge and forgot that stereotypes are not made to live within humans and their versatile psychology. I sat more than once on the fifth row of the small cinema, unknowingly waiting for what was to be the turning point of the opinion I retained about movies and their individuality. Each time a new story. I looked at the screen, I heard the voice of an actor speaking in broken German, witnessed the pain of a couple divided by political decisions of a suffocating systems and a student's life turned upside down by a senseless vendetta.
I watched the same films more than once. I looked again at the screen with the same awe of a child discovering for the first time a truth he had consciously ignored. We had all discussed these problems in Sociology classes, reprimanding the sometime perpetual necessity of a lost generation to turn back the time and find a way to make their future easier to live. I pretended to understand yet refused to accept their pain. And it was in that dark room one afternoon that it came to me : in Albanian cinematography I so much distrusted I had found the pictures behind my bed-time stories, made me realise that every life has its own history to tell and not two sufferance are the same.
Nowadays, though I still feel a little bit reluctant when invited over to watch a movie, my attitude has changed. Old habits die hard, but thankfully new ideas are even easier to become part of your life. That piece Albanian culture I had rejected turned into my guideline into deciphering the individual destinies of a population I shared but the blood with. Do I know everything now? Of course I don't. Those films were but the beginning of understanding the past and present of something I am a small part of. Because one thing I know for sure : there is no human being to be understood without its identity.
