“Let’s sing a lullaby, not to send this gigantic iron and cement-built baby to sleep. Let’s sing a lullaby so that it grows stronger, so that revolution can march incessantly through its veins”. These verses from a nursery rhyme dating back to the Soviet period in Albania and carrying some kind of message, reappear throughout Austrian director Johannes Gierlinger’s documentary, Generations of Images, which was screened in a world premiere within the Bergamo Film Meeting’s Close-Up Competition and is set to be re-screened in Graz’s Diagonale festival at the end of March. But is it a call to revolution or a lullaby complying with the regime? In this exploration of the process of transformation which Albanian history has experienced, conveyed by copious archive material and modern-day interviews on the ground, the film reveals the deep divides resulting from the transition from communist dictatorship to capitalist democracy, whilst also highlighting how strong the country’s ties still are with the past.

Gierlinger is a versatile visual artist; in his video installations, short films and feature films he focuses on forms of memory, recollections and perspectives of resistance, and explores paths and connections between different eras and political systems. His approach in Generations of Images takes a similarly poetic-essayistic form. The voiceover (his?) which comments on self-aggrandising footage from the communist period – the monuments erected by an elite group from the past, crowds applauding Supreme Leader Enver Hoxha – uses suggestive turns of phrase to ask how much of an effect this footage could still have on society today and to what extent these notions are interwoven and perceptible in that country today. “This is where we can start looking back on dramas by observing the order of things; the past explains itself in the light of recently discovered footage...” Or rather: “Constellations from different eras are like star formations and they behave differently according to their location in the sky. How eagerly one dreams of the next era”. Gierlinger stops the footage at certain points, points out faces and specific details, and frames them using a typical filmmaker gesture: positioning the thumbs and index fingers of both hands to form a rectangle.

More traditionally, Generations of Images contrasts the words of citizens who feel nostalgic about the regime - “when you could sleep on the street with a bag of gold coins and no-one would attack you” - with those of a group of young high school students. As an elderly man in a remote rural cottage reminisces, “One leader, one party, no divisions. We didn’t have to think about anything, the regime’s priorities were health, education and public order. It was enough for us. And no-one would ever have imagined that one day it would all collapse”. A man selling books in the street, who returned to Tirana after 20 years spent abroad, laments the time during communism when “people looked after one another, there was more love”. Maybe he means those people who had to queue for food? The youngsters interviewed in the film have very clear ideas: “That old mentality still remains. Our generation is the first not to have any real connection with communism. We’ll take Albania in a totally different direction. But now the country needs to do more to convince myself and lots of other young people to stay here and to see our future here”. The testimony given by 95-year-old dissident musician Lekë Tasi, who was interned in the village of Grabjan for 20 years, is both beautiful and moving: “We’re still here and we live in hope.” Tasi has very lucidly denounced how mankind was degraded during the dictatorship and society’s hypocrisy once it was free, due primarily to a lack of repentance. Like many other countries around the world, in all these years Albanian society still hasn’t faced up to its past.

Generations of Images was produced by Johannes Gierlinger and Lara Bellon with support from Bmkoes, Land Salzburg, Cine Art Styria and Stadt Wien.