KAPEDANI 4K restoration screened at Tirana International Film Festival

Produced during a too-brief period of liberalization, the Albanian classic KAPEDANI / THE CAPTAIN (1972) is still regarded as one of the most beloved treasures in the history of Albanian motion pictures. The story of the white-moustached warrior Sulo, who leaves his village for the capital to find out why women have been given the same rights as men, is still a staple of Albanian television. Part of the reason for its continued circulation is that it stands miles apart from much of the rigid stylistic and thematic restrictions imposed on films of the time. In fact, Kapedani opens with a sequence in which the proud Sulo imagines taking on Albania’s foes, both Nazi’s and Ottoman Turks, on the same battlefield. Imagination and comedy were not the stuff of socialist art and in less than a year, after yet another traumatic crackdown, there would be no more Kapedanis.

Directed by Muharrem Fejzo and Fehmi Hoshafi, this innovative film is considered one of the very best motion pictures Albania has produced and the tragic high point of a startling, and all too brief, relaxation in the Communist government’s tight rein on artistic freedom. In the time since, Albania’s contribution to the canon of East European cinema classics has been unjustly ignored. A properly restored and subtitled version of Kapedani is the important first step in bringing this undiscovered treasure of world cinema to its deserved place in the list of international motion picture masterworks and a lightning rod of inspiration for a national cinema still struggling to define itself.

The digital restoration of this film was made possible thanks to A Season of Classic Films, an initiative of Association des Cinémathèques Européennes (ACE), with the support of the EU Creative Europe MEDIA Programme.
THE CAPTAIN has been restored from the original 35mm negative elements by DABIMUS srl – a spin-off of University of Bari “Aldo Moro”, Italy, from original negative elements scanned by the Albanian National Film Archive (AQSHF).

The free-admission premiere event was organized in Tirana’s Millennium Cinema on September 24, 2024, in the framework of Tirana International Film Festival, the main film event in the capital, as part of the program TIFF Classics. During the event AQSHF honored the artists and paid tribute to the filmmakers and actors that are no longer among us but left their mark in Albanian film history.