In this article
Kinostudio and propaganda at the dictatorship’s end
The year 1989 marked the beginning of the end for Europe’s communist dictatorships. Economic collapse and a wave of public disillusionment drove mass revolts. They spread quickly from Poland to Hungary, East Germany, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia and Romania.
By the end of the year, they would culminate in the fall of the Berlin Wall and the violent overthrow of Nicolae Ceaușescu’s dictatorship in Bucharest. While those regimes struggled under the pressure of popular revolt, Albania’s still had the power to suppress it. That power owed much to propaganda and to the machinery of “revolutionary vigilance” that the Sigurimi, Albania’s state security service, had sown and harvested for 45 years.
In 1989, Albania’s regime was planning celebrations. The 45th anniversary of Liberation had to be accompanied by a vast propaganda effort. What was happening in the other communist countries had to be eclipsed.
As in every anniversary year, the dictatorship proposed honors, decorations and titles. One of them, the “Order of the Flag,” was proposed for the “New Albania” Film Studio, known as Kinostudio.
The studio was to be honored for developing cinema as “militant art beloved by the masses,” as a “powerful weapon for communist education,” and for having “vividly reflected the Party’s glorious era” (File 213, Central State Archives, Fonds 489, Presidium of the People’s Assembly, 1989).
The proposal was rejected because Kinostudio had already received the Order of the Flag in 1987 and also held the First-Class Order of Labor (1962) and the Red Banner of Labor (1976).
It was precisely this work under the “red flags” of Kinostudio’s propaganda that had woven codes of obedience to the system into Albanian citizens’ behavior. Few could escape them, despite attempts to tune in to signals from foreign stations.
Founded on July 10, 1952, Kinostudio would produce 227 feature films, 1,145 documentaries, 1,006 newsreels and 122 animated films by 1991.
Across almost 40 years of activity, those totals amount to an average of about 64 productions a year; the production requirement also called for seven feature films with ideologically controlled content each year. They were systematically screened in every town, village and organization, because this was how the regime spread its models of behavior.
Under the dictatorship, film was seen fundamentally as a propaganda tool. It was intended to create the “new man,” whom those in power could easily keep obedient.
The aim was to achieve this by planting communist norms in film scripts. By extravagantly embellishing so-called “socialist” reality, glorifying and distorting history, especially the partisan war, and ignoring, belittling and denigrating the so-called “overthrown classes.”
Broadcasting the films after 1991
Thirty years have passed since the end of Europe’s communist dictatorships. In Albania, too, the dictatorship fell, but the end of its propaganda broadcasts never began.
The long transition to democracy brought many processes that promised reflection on the past. In Albania, they quickly died without producing any reflection.
Take the reorganization of the former Kinostudio system and the establishment of the National Center of Cinematography (QKK): it passed without a reckoning with the dictatorship’s film art. QKK was established in 1996 and assumed administration of the old film output in 2005, a process spanning roughly a decade. It even had a viewing commission that could have undertaken such a review.
Completing and strengthening the legal framework for media, copyright and the bodies responsible for overseeing them took still more time.
Yet despite those developments, the former Kinostudio’s films are broadcast today without filtering, analysis or context about what the dictatorship was really like. By taking control of cinema, that dictatorship had drawn itself an angelic face.
Digital television platforms and Albania’s public broadcaster, RTSH, pay to show them.
Under the arrangements administered by QKK, 30% of the contract value goes to the state, while the remaining 70% is allocated to artists through three organizations protecting the interests of filmmakers, actors and composers. The artists receive that share as holders of rights in the works.
The debate over reviewing the film archive
In 2017, Agron Tufa, director of the Institute for the Study of Communist Crimes and Their Consequences (ISKK), called for a review of how the dictatorship’s films were broadcast. Such a process could begin the decommunization that Albanian society so badly needs.
But like every other process intended to encourage reflection on Albania’s past, this initiative was quickly killed by a thoroughly dishonest and deliberately distorted debate that took over the media.
The “militant art” that the dictatorial regime regarded as a “powerful weapon for communist education,” which had “vividly reflected the Party’s glorious era,” was defended with zeal and insults, on the grounds that someone was seeking to “censor the national treasure of cinema.”
Censorship would indeed mean banning the dictatorship’s films outright, but that was not Tufa’s proposal for the entire body of work. He proposed that broadcasts, at least on public television, be selected according to the level of propaganda they carried, or at a minimum accompanied by a notice explaining that the film represented the propaganda of the Party of Labor of Albania rather than the reality of the time.
The proposal needed the support of the artists themselves, most of whom had, of course, been forced by the system to produce that kind of captive art. Only a critical approach could free them and give their work greater value, making it worthy of the label “national treasure,” rather than the other way around.
The proposal also needed lawmakers’ support. That did not materialize either.
Support came only from former victims of persecution and nongovernmental organizations such as the Institute for Democracy, Media and Culture (IDMC).
Several other countries that emerged from communist dictatorship have restricted overt propaganda in their broadcasts, or screened films with historical context. Ukraine has also legislated restrictions on films that glorify Soviet security bodies or justify the occupation of its territory. Those restrictions have defined scopes and exceptions; they are not a blanket ban on every film made under communism.
Albania’s approach is quite different. Broadcast without restraint, the former Kinostudio’s films stir up an unhealthy nostalgia for a distorted reality, and they also keep money circulating.
Through 30 years of transition, institutions have still failed to establish how many people were actually persecuted by Albania’s dictatorship. The figures range from 42,700 to more than 100,000.
Much is said about Albanian society’s need to reflect on the dictatorship. Perhaps that reflection should begin with the transition.
What went wrong over these 30 years was that so many wounds, problems and unresolved questions from 45 years of dictatorship were allowed to drown in silence and oblivion. As though time itself would heal the suffering of the past.
That is why the debate about the dictatorship’s films, and how they are broadcast, must continue.
* Editorial clarification, 9 October 2026: This English edition corrects several historical details in the 2021 essay. The four production totals add up to 2,500, or approximately 64 a year over the 39-year period specified in the author’s research, replacing the original average of 74. The seven-feature-film production requirement is kept separate from that arithmetic average.
QKK was established in 1996 and assumed administration of the former studio’s film output in 2005. The historical contract allocation was 30% to the state and 70% through the artists’ rights agencies, clarified here without treating those rights as ownership of the public archive itself. Tufa’s proposal dates to 2017 and distinguished restrictions on a particularly propagandistic subset from a blanket ban on the whole corpus (the author’s 2019 IDMC study, pages 23–33 and 94).
The international comparison has also been narrowed: the author’s interviews describe differing approaches to overt propaganda, selection and historical context, not the disappearance of all communist-era cinema from other countries’ screens (IDMC study, pages 54–61). Ukraine’s restrictions address specified propaganda and are subject to legal scope and exceptions, rather than banning every film made under communism (2015 law, including articles 4 and 7; Library of Congress legal survey).