Prof. Bruce Williams
The Eagle Spreads Its Wings: International Reception of the New Albanian Cinema
In the wake of the demise of Kinostudio, Albanian cinema of the post-Communist/post-pyramid era has been forced to seek out new avenues of creation and divulgation through international co-production. Such a direction has transformed what used to be one of the world’s most isolated cinema traditions into a new opened-ended and often poetic discourse. It has also altered radically the trans-cultural reception of Albanian film. The paper examines how Albanian cinema of the 1990s and 2000s has been received internationally and how the socio-political realities of today’s Albania have been understood abroad through the mediation of this cinema.  It focuses on the work of Kujtim Çhashku, Mevlan Shanaj, Vladimir Prifi, Fatmir Koçi, etc.


Prof. Bruce Williams
Bruce Williams is full professor at the William Paterson University of New Jersey and is director of the Graduate Program of the Department of Languages and Cultures. He has published extensively on issues related to cinema and nationalism, the sociolinguistics of the cinema, and Brazilian silent/experimental film. Together with a book manuscript on the films of Guillermo del Toro, Williams is currently at work on issues of censorship in the cinemas of Albania, (West) Germany, and the U.S.