TOWARDS

TOWARDS tells an Albanian story that takes place in the near future. Following the historical ruptures of past relations with the USSR and the PRC in the 60s and ’70s, Albania is once again isolated from the world stage as it has ruptured relations with the USA. Based on “Drejt Epsilonit te Eridanit” (Towards Epsilon Eridani, 1983) by Arion Hysenbegas, the best-known adult science fiction novel published in Albania during socialism, the film combines the lost promise of socialist solidarity and brotherhood with the curse of current neoliberalism. The story begins right after the last diplomatic break, and is set in a world that is falling apart. In this world the protagonist C (the writer of the book), and his reflection C1 (the protagonist of the book), embark on a journey within themselves, where memories, cinema, mistakes and political sins go beyond communism and neo-imperialism. This path towards the common ideal also activates a need for "historical desertion". The journey happens also into the past where the past political friendships and diplomatic relations are scrutinizes, in an attempt to find ways to mend the broken histories and reactivate the idea of the collective once again. Albania's three greatest political loves - Russia, China and the United States - are represented only as archives of a past full of mistakes and failures: such as Nikita Khrushchev's visit in 1959; Chou En Lai's visit in 1966; the visit of the American Secretary of State, James Baker, in 1991, and finally the footage of the Shock Therapy of 1997 - the first serious crisis of capitalism in Albania. The past is also represented by original Albanian postage stamps from the 1960s, ’70s, and late 2000s, stamps portraying cosmos and space travel, but mostly historical stamps depicting political figures such as Stalin, Mao, George W. Bush and Lenin. Only by reactivating the past in the cosmos could we have a chance to repeat it again, correctly, on our common Earth.
The two episodes of TOWARDS are of equal length and consist of 9 scenes each. The narratives of the two episodes work both independently and combined, thus producing a third, complete narrative. The film has no beginning or end, but a meeting point in time within the narrative. Its non-linear, episodic structure moves through time and space, is abstract, fragmented, and relates the book's narratives to a wider political constellation of ideas about cosmos and space. The original text of the book, "Towards Epsilon Eridani", has been used as the starting point towards a multi-layered film regarding time and space, past and present, archive and cinema, colonization of space and other possible futures.