editing
Luca Onorati
music
Riccardo Giagni
sound
Paolo Amici

production
Luce Cinecittà

Italian press office
Marlon Pellegrini
m.pellegrini@cinecitta.it

Starting from the end of the Second World War and for over forty years, the history of Albania was inextricably entwined with that of a single man. Enver Hoxha guided the country through ephemeral alliances and radical breaks with the status quo, driving him to adopt total isolation. A State Film shows us the forty-year-long Communist regime in Albania through material that the state produced to promote itself. Drawing entirely on often never-before-released archive footage – official propaganda films, footage from the regime’s private or reserved holdings – this film weds images and sound to portray a regime that used cinema as a tool of power. Just what do these same images tell us today?

2025 Film di stato (doc)
2024 Acqua, porta via tutto (medium-length)
2021 La macchina delle immagini di Alfredo C. (doc)
2018 Come vincere la guerra (doc)
2015 L’attesa (doc)
2015 Sue proprie mani (short, directed with Adrian Paci)
2014 9×10 Novanta (collective film)
2012 Anija, la nave (doc)
2010 Albania il paese di fronte (doc)

“A State Film is a film made up exclusively of images that exist, but one that uses editing, sound, and pacing to create a different narrative than that which those images wanted to impose on viewers. The aim is not just to show, but to transform and draw out, from inside the propaganda machine, the fractures, voids, and other signs of a potentially new reading of the images. And so of reality as well, perhaps.” (Roland Sejko)

Roland Sejko was born and raised in Albania. In 1990, he graduated from the University of Tirana with a degree in history and philology. He has lived in Rome since 1991 and has worked at the Instituto Luce – now Cinecittà – since 1995, and is currently editorial director of the Luce Archives. A director and screenwriter, he has made numerous documentaries that creatively reuse film archives, one of which, Anija / La nave, won a David di Donatello in 2013. His most recent feature film, La macchina delle immagini di Alfredo C., screened in competition at the 78th Venice Film Festival (Orizzonti Extra), winning a Silver Ribbon for Best Docufilm in 2021. Sejko has curated and made films of several exhibitions put on by Cinecittà and Istituto Luce, and is one of the curators of MIAC – the Italian Audiovisual and Cinema Museum at Cinecittà.