[Ëmbëlsirat vijnë nga Lindja / The Sweets come from the East]
S y n o p s i s
Two elderly Albanian spouses visit their son, who has been living in Bucharest for over two decades. A bilingual writer, he also has a high position in the academic field. His parents bring lots of sweets and jam jars from home, but also an old shoebox containing several well-kept pieces of paper the son wrote when he was still in high-school.
The meeting between the parents and the son is characterized by a humour that can also be perceived as a well-controlled explosion of longing and tenderness towards one another, but also towards the bygone Balkan life. One could even have the impression that a life apparently deprived of elementary freedoms, pressured by a dictatorship's attempts to formalize the human being, can be incredibly artistic.
Some of the text’s central questions are: Is it worth it to accept the limitation of freedom for the sake of having an artistic life – and vice versa? Have the Balkan people been chosen to live a sometimes too artistic life, because the anti-human ideologies intended nothing but the opposite for them – or is modus vivendi an already genetic feature? What would it mean to have an artistic life in the context of globalization?
Once written with a different intention, the son’s papers suddenly receive a new and unanticipated role/function and importance, by being reread years later in Bucharest. Many people’s destinies, most of which were unknown or became unrecognizable with time have the fascinating ability to compose an image of life back then, but also of contemporary life.
A few events that the useless information surplus was keeping asleep in the memory are being awakened to restore the essential back in its place; as if an advertising magazine were suddenly forced to become an encyclopedia.
Conceived to be published in a book, filmed, staged or animated, ’Sweets come from the East’ presents, from a less-known point of view, some essential information about the Balkan spirituality and mentality, as well as a few touching truths about the meeting between the East and the West, after the fall of the Berlin Wall.
"Ex Oriente dulcibus" is part of a trilogy in
Albanian (from which The
Supplement / Shtojca was
published in 2015) and is connected with the Eastories cinematographic
cycle, written in
Romanian.
* This script was finished in Split, (May 2024) during the literary residence offered by Traduki and Udruga KURS Split