Paper short abstract:

This paper explores how Albanian youth transform exercises geared towards reckoning with the socialist past to describe their present desires. As my interlocutors demonstrate, youth juggle feelings of hope and disappointment in their reflections of the present and imaginations of the near future.

Paper long abstract:

The Albanian film Cuca e Maleve, or The Girl of the Mountains, is a socialist-era film that deals with tropes of resistance and change via the actions of youth. The film addresses the fate of a young woman who is killed for challenging the long-standing authority of her villages' traditional codes. Cuca, an advocate for gender equality and women's right, is depicted as a martyr for the new socialist cause and an idealized proponent of urban socialist progress over rural feudalism and patriarchy.

In 2018, the Institute for Democracy, Media, and Culture invited Albanian students from Tirana and nearby cities to confront films like Cuca e Maleve as products of the socialist moment. This activity was held within a broader societal debate about how to engage with socialist-era media that obfuscated the hardships many Albanian families faced during that time period. It also coincided with a separate protest critiquing urban neoliberal development regimes. In this paper, I draw on both the film itself and interviews with youth in attendance to discuss how this exercise became a means for youth to express dissatisfaction with life in contemporary Albanian and their desires for their present and future. While many were cognizant of this film's place in past propaganda, they were equally critical of contemporary forms of propaganda and some even found kinship with characters, like Cuca. Their own stories of activism, of seeking out pathways in the present, were caught within the overlapping affective spheres of disappointment and hope.