The 2025 documentary “In Socialist Paradise (It Never Rains),” directed by Ermela Teli, is a bold and analytical attempt to explore the gap between the communist regime’s state propaganda in Albania, which depicted life under socialism as a utopian construct, and the harsh reality of the country which was characterized by totalitarian violence, systematic surveillance, political persecution, and, ultimately, its profound isolation from the rest of the world.

The documentary premiered at the Central State Film Archive (CSFA) in Tirana in February of this year and had its national premiere in Kosovo at the Documentary and Short Film Festival, Dokufest, in Prizren. So far, it has received the Special Jury Prize at the “Balkan Film Food Festival,” recently held in Pogradec, in recognition of its innovative and well-structured approach exposing the mechanisms of propaganda and the absurdities of a system that instrumentalized art to control and manipulate society. The documentary’s next stop will be Kino Armata on November 22 in Prishtina.

Using cinema as a critical instrument, Teli highlights the conflict between public and private life in Enver Hoxha’s Albania, between the illusion of a socialist utopia and the daily cruelty of a paranoid regime. The film is constructed as a research-based analysis, where the director weaves together her family’s experience with the broader context of Albanian socialist society. She explores state archives for official nuances and imagery — not only in cinematography but also in painting, folklore and even music — in an effort to illuminate a reality similar to the video recordings of her childhood. Teli places these materials in dialogue with a narrative structure that dismantles the mechanisms of propaganda, revealing how ideology permeated everyday life.

The premise from which Teli’s entire research journey begins is a sincere curiosity rooted in her own childhood memories of socialist Tirana. In the archival images of the Teli family, which she integrates into the film, the viewer observes what appears to be an ordinary family gathering, characterized by the intimacy and joy of the moments caught on film. Yet this artificial innocence, aligned with the official rhetoric of the time, in fact conceals the deeper contradictions of life under socialism — contradictions that expose a forced adaptation to state control as a mechanism of self-preservation.

The family videos date back to the 1980s, when the Albanian regime had already entered a deep and terminal crisis that, just a few years later, would culminate in the fall of one of the harshest dictatorships in the Eastern Bloc, paving the way for a long and difficult transition. Teli’s father was arrested in 1983 on charges of attempted escape and failure to report alleged collaborators, and sentenced to five years in the notorious Spaç prison — one of the regime’s penal institutions for political prisoners, where inmates were subjected to various forms of torture, forced labor and ideological re-education. From that moment onward, the family lived under constant surveillance by the state apparatus and in a heightened state of fear.

Art under the guise of socialist realism

In the first part of the documentary, Teli embarks on an internal and analytical inquiry to understand how art can expose the contradictory mechanisms of socialism, as a way to reconcile her own experience with what she has identified as a fabricated reality. For this reason, her attention initially turns to the years between 1960–1970, a period when socialism in Albania had already been consolidated and when, paradoxically, state repression reached new extremes — such as the total ban on religious practices in 1967, the closure of all religious institutions and places of worship, and the declaration of Albania as the world’s first atheist state in the 1976 Constitution.

At the same time, signs of modernization and a relatively more liberal spirit began to emerge in the artistic sphere, through aesthetic experiments and expressionist elements in the visual arts and music. However, this phase, a kind of artistic wave, during which artists tested new forms of expression within a system that continued to monitor them closely, was short-lived. As noted by local and foreign art scholars and intellectuals such as Mikaela Minga, Julian Bejko, Ermir Hoxha and Raino Isto, this brief opening was quickly followed by renewed repression that targeted artists who showed tendencies toward expressionist currents or approaches later deemed to be ideological deviations.

This wave of persecution forms the bridge between the first and second parts of the documentary, as the narrative begins to highlight the deepening uncertainties and confusion that intensified, especially after the death of Enver Hoxha in 1985.

The construction of Albanian socialist realism, like the construction of socialist reality itself in Albania, was a process that did not develop organically from the internal dynamics of Albanian political culture but was imported as an interpretation method from the Soviet experience of art in the Stalinist period. This importation was not only aesthetic, it was also epistemological — a new way of thinking about reality, art and the human being — which aimed to replace the plurality of lived experience with the monolithism of ideology.

The term “socialist realism” was firmly established in Albanian political and cultural discourse after 1948, when Tito’s split with Stalin shifted Tirana’s ideological orientation from Belgrade to Moscow. This turn, as researcher Jonida Gashi explains in her monograph Cinema on Trial, was not only a geopolitical move but also an ontological reorientation of the way reality was to be seen and represented. From that moment onward, the dialectical processes of tension between the new and the old became the axiom through which culture was to be conceived. Art had to become a terrain of ideological conflict, where the “new” — that is, socialism and the socialist human it produced — would triumph over the “old,” which represented bourgeois, religious or traditional worldviews. Thus, all forms of artistic production were subjected to the control of the state apparatus and the institutions of censorship at the time.

Socialist realism, like socialist reality itself in Albania, was built on the denial of truth, institutionalized as a refined apparatus for falsifying human experience, where even the most intimate moments of citizens were reconstructed to fit the ideological axis. The transformative processes of this newly embellished world, attempted to remodel life and reality within an invented utopia, while aiming to redefine the very concept of the enemy, constantly expanding it and making it more abstract — from the initial identification of fascist “collaborators” and Nazism, toward the figure of the “enemy of the people,” who could be anyone: from critics of the system to the most devout communists within party ranks, from the image of God and religious faith to natural phenomena such as rain.

Rain, Teli’s silent companion during her prison meetings with her father in the mid-1980s, became a melancholic element of personal memory, creating a conscious rupture between an imposed ideological reality and the original experience of the director herself and of many other citizens. Yet even this seemingly neutral natural phenomenon could not escape the totalizing logic of ideology, which had politicized rain as well, assigning the climate the nuances of a political agent that threatened the economy and socialist order.

Melancholy, or even worse, any form of nostalgia, could not be reconciled with the reality of socialist-realist art, which promised only unquestionable happiness. At the same time, especially in the late 1980s, the regime blamed nature — rain, prolonged droughts, frost, freezes, etc. — for the deep economic crisis and famine in which the country found itself. If the new socialist man of this period no longer had to confront the “enemies of the people,” real or imagined, he now confronted the forces of nature. Rain was allowed to exist only insofar as it contributed to the image of the new man, who, in the name of socialism, triumphed over nature. This is illustrated in Teli’s documentary by her research into films such as “Open Horizons” (1968) and “The Editor” (1970) as well as its more subdued appearance as a romantic element in the film “In Every Season” (1980). The Enverist regime had approved only political and totalitarian rain; any existence of rain outside these categories was strictly prohibited.

By focusing on these seemingly insignificant yet essential elements of human experience under socialism, Teli’s documentary becomes a cathartic processing of memory, which simultaneously aims to free it from totalitarian forms, restoring dignity to silent experiences. In this sense, every image, sound or archival fragment is not simply documentary material, but an act of testimony — a trace of human resistance in the face of the totalizing apparatus of power.

“I wanted to make a film about the contradictory relationship of man with ideology,” said Teli, “about how, in an autocratic system, man is forced to become someone else in order to survive.”

With this statement, the director clearly establishes the ethical framework of the film: the exploration of that violent division between self and mask, between survival and truth, positing a universalism that remains relevant today.

Feature image: Film still from In Socialist Paradise (It Never Rains)