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THE DREAM & THE LIE
U.S., 2024
For over four decades, from 1944–1991, Albania was ruled by one of the most repressive dictatorships anywhere in the world. For most of that time, the Marxist-Leninist regime was led by Enver Hoxha, who ruthlessly suppressed any opposition and kept his fearful population isolated from the outside world. Throughout that period, Albanians could see images of themselves and their country only as represented in the fiction features and documentaries produced by the state-run New Albania Kinostudio. In 1993, two years after the end of the regime, Albanian American visual artist and photographer Elena Dorfman began regularly visiting her mother’s home country and in 2018 she was granted unprecedented access to the collection of the Albanian National Film Archive. The result of her archival research, Dorfman’s experimental feature documentary, THE DREAM & THE LIE brings scenes from the archive’s film holdings together in a widescreen triptych image that can feel both epic and intimate in scale all at once. A captivating exploration of how movies were used by the regime to construct a powerful national mythology that penetrated deep into daily life, THE DREAM & THE LIE is also a visually arresting example of how artists can creatively and productively engage with archival material. The UCLA Film & Television Archive is pleased to host Elena Dorfman at the Billy Wilder Theater for a screening of THE DREAM & THE LIE followed by an in person conversation with the Archive’s 2025 Artist-in-Residence Ariel West about the film and relationship between the artist and the archive.
DCP, color and b&w, 70 min. Director: Elena Dorfman.
Programmed and note written by Senior Public Programmer Paul Malcolm.
