Recounting the tragic and forgotten love story of the filmmaker’s Albanian great-grandparents and their forced separation, A Pigeon’s Song deals with a personal story during one of Europe’s harshest communist regimes.  

Synopsis

Director Eneos Carka takes the audience on a journey into his family’s past while at the same time discussing the fragility of our memory. Awakened by the sound of a pigeon each morning, the filmmaker makes a daily routine out of leafing through his great-grandfather’s prison diary. He learns that a pigeon also accompanied him as he wrote in his cell. This solitary, timeless pigeon fills the gaps of what is forgotten while awakening unspoken family wounds. Intertwining fiction and reality in a visually experimental manner, the director wants to make sure that the personal and political drama of his family, in fact the drama of several generations, the drama of a country, is not allowed to fade away and be forgotten in the darkest corners of history.

KENGA E PELLUMBIT

Albania, Belgium | 2021 | 16 min

DIRECTOR: Eneos Carka

PRODUCTION: Eneos Carka – DocNomads

VISUAL EFFECTS: Stivi Imami, Milto Carka

SCREENPLAY, EDITING: Eneos Carka

SOUND: Aurelien Lebourg

SCREENING: Saturday 26 November / 15:45h / Zaal 6

DUTCH PREMIERE

Director’s statement

In Albania, forgetting is a cultural habit. The society I grew up in forgot and forgave the inhumane crimes the dictatorship committed for five decades up until the fall of Socialism in 1990. Stories were manipulated to blame the ideology as opposed to the people who applied it, and eventually even those narratives were forgotten. My struggle as a storyteller is to fight this habit. I was determined to recount the forgotten story of my great-grandparents and how they were forced to forget their loved one. Their love became impossible due to the politics of the time.

Director’s bio

Eneos Çarka is a Los Angeles based filmmaker. He graduated from DocNomads Masters on Creative Documentary and is currently a PhD student and Annenberg Fellow in Cinema and Media Studies at the University of Southern California. His films have screened at numerous festivals, galleries and cultural events, such as Rencontres Internationales Paris/Berlin in Musée du Louvre, Message to Man IFF, and Festival dei Popoli among others. As both a filmmaker and a curator, he pays particular attention to issues of representation experimenting with the various approaches to documentary cinema.

Festivals & Awards (selection)

Balkan Film Food Fest, 2022 – Best Experimental Short Festival dei Popoli, Docs at Work 2021 – World Premiere | DokuFest, 2022 | goEast Film Festival, 2022 | Taiwan International Documentary Festival, 2022 | SEEfest Los Angeles, 2022