by Driant Zeneli, 2017, 13'
| COURTESY: the artist, MAM Foundation Tirana and Prometeo Gallery di Ida Pisani, Milano/Lucca |
Presented at Directing the Real. Artists’ Film and Video in the 2010s, 2017
Mario is a man who always had the passion of flying and building airplanes. Metallurgjik is the place that hosts an abandoned factory with a surface of around 250 thousand hectares, where 12 thousand people used to work during the 70’s in Albania. Mario today became a master in assembling flying machines and he has the persistent desire to reach a faraway place, in the outer space. Metallurgjik emptied from its workers, exposes its ruins as a tangible proof of the failure of a project part of an ideal society imagined by Albanian communism. The film is a simultaneous rendezvous between utopia and dystopia and encounters two desires: the one of an ideal society and the separation from it. Both, interdependent, could not survive without each other.
Mario is a man who always had the passion of flying and building airplanes. Metallurgjik is the place that hosts an abandoned factory with a surface of around 250 thousand hectares, where 12 thousand people used to work during the 70’s in Albania. Mario today became a master in assembling flying machines and he has the persistent desire to reach a faraway place, in the outer space. Metallurgjik emptied from its workers, exposes its ruins as a tangible proof of the failure of a project part of an ideal society imagined by Albanian communism. The film is a simultaneous rendezvous between utopia and dystopia and encounters two desires: the one of an ideal society and the separation from it. Both, interdependent, could not survive without each other.