Women and children in tears, and men with clenched fists form an endless queue, taking turns to approach a grave and touch it with visible emotion. It’s 1985 in Tirana, and this sober marble mausoleum belongs to Enver Hoxha who was the longest-serving communist dictator in the world. Thus begins Roland Sejko’s A State Film, which was presented in a world premiere in the Venice Nights section of the 2025 Giornate degli Autori event in Venice and which is now screening in the Main Opus Bonum Competition of the Ji.hlava International Documentary Film Festival. The movie charts the 40-year period in which Hoxha ruled over Albania with his brutal and isolationist regime.

The proud owner of a David and a Nastro d'Argento for his documentaries characterised by creative reuse of archive film, Roland Sejko is currently editing director at the Archivio Storico Luce. A State Film examines the propaganda machine which was a key part of the Albanian dictatorship’s trajectory, exclusively using archive material which in many cases has never been released, including official propaganda films and footage made with restricted or private nomenklatura funds hailing from Albania’s Central Film Archive and the Labour Party’s Central Committee Fund.

Retaining the original audio and enhancing any crackling and rustling noises - sound design is by Paolo Amici – the documentary shows us parades of male and female workers, and smiling farmers against a backdrop of red flags, Stalin and Hoxha’s faces, and slogans such as “The first threshing goes to the state”. It’s the moment when the regime aligned most closely with the Soviets: We see Hoxha visiting Lenin’s mausoleum and watching young Russians taking part in demanding gymnastic exercises in the company of Stalin, the man who deported millions of dissidents to gulags. Back home, Hoxha erects new statues, he gives speeches to sweeping crowds, including upon the death of Stalin, a “beloved father and teacher”. He swears to defend his country “against imperialist warmongers and their servants”; he signs a treaty with the new Kremlin leader Nikita Chruščhov, who’ll later become a target for his barbs (as a “revisionist and a traitor to Marxist-Leninist principles”).

After breaking with Russia, the regime allies itself with Mao Zedong’s China, which provides financial aid and support to this country which has now become an armoured ideological fortress spiralling into paranoia and tragically taking an entire people down with it. The construction of thousands of bunkers clashes with the highly coloured choreography of military drills and with the 1 May celebrations which rival American musicals. The regime’s personality cult is pervasive and the Orwellian side of its population control apparatus dominates every single moment of people’s lives, like some kind of diabolical Big Brother.

A State Film is the purest kind of documentary, devoid of any historical commentary, voice-over or captions. The film’s narration is wholly reliant on the editing process (managed by Luca Onorati) and subsequently requires a degree of audience familiarity with the history in question in order to appreciate the unravelling of these ideological propaganda mechanisms and its consequences. The scale of this half-a-century-long nightmare is summarised in one short sequence where a report on the state of the economy - detailing a scarcity of goods and long queues at shops - is read to an indifferent Hoxha. But none of this can possibly convey what was later revealed by all of those imprisoned by Eastern Europe’s most feared secret services, where the relentless police wheel crushed both everyday citizens and members of the nomenklatura. Thanks to the director’s use of images which convey false messages and impose a uniform vision of the world, A State Film easily allows us to draw parallels with the post-ideological politics we’re seeing today and the Trumpian approach of constant, aggressive communication.

A State Film was produced by Luce Cinecittà who are also managing world sales.