Ever wanted to see an epic film from Albania? Here’s your chance. In the spirit of the epic Soviet films from Sergei Eisenstein, The Great Warrior Skanderbeg does not disappoint. Yes, there are heavily stereotyped characters and a lot of nationalism, but there is also epic battles and even arm wrestling. If you’re up for watching something epic with an epic action movie character (think Conan the Barbarian) this one is for you. You can even watch it here on YouTube!
Why Watch Skanderbeg?
To see the most Albanian film not made by an Albanian
Learn about Albania’s most famous historical character (perhaps the first Albanian?)
You just finished Ben Hur and want to see something equally epic
For all the rivalries – watch the Skanderbeg face off against the Turks, the Venetians, and the Serbians!
The Breakdown
‘The Greatest Warrior of Albania’ flashes across the screen as some doors open to reveal an incredible view of a mountain valley. This film is about the myth of Skanderbeg, a myth which has constructed Skanderbeg as a national hero of Albania. As a result there is a lot of nationalist ‘propaganda’ which is not surprising considering that this is a co-production between the Soviet Union and Albania from the 1950s.
So how is it nationalist? It’s nationalist because Skanderbeg is depicted as a figure who united all the rival groups living under the Turks and Venetians as ‘Albanians.’ It’s nationalist because Albanian culture is shown throughout; there’s an Albanian wedding, Albanian Christianity, and Albanian costume.
What’s more is that the early story structure is almost identical to the story of Moses. Both Skanderbeg and Moses are princes of their future rivals, Skanderbeg serves the Turks while Moses serves Egypt. Secondly, they both receive a ‘call to action’ which leads Skanderbeg to betray the Turks and Moses to betray Egypt in favour of their people. They both become national leaders and demand liberty from the powers they formerly served. Skanderbeg becomes a leader of Albania, whilst Moses led the Israelites. Of course they both end up in epic climactic battles!
Conclusion
The Great Warrior Skanderbeg won prizes at Cannes after it’s release in the 1950s. Despite the unapologetic nationalism, it is an epic film. It has some epic battles with huge casts which are reminiscent of the master of epic film, Sergei Eisenstein (see Alexander Nevsky or Battleship Potemkin). You’ll also learn a fair bit about Albanian history and it’s relationships with the Italian Kingdoms, the Turks, and Serbians. Just ignore the overly stereotyped characters!
Asmaa Film Difficulty Ranking: 3
Can you imagine a place where TV adverts about HIV/AIDS show scary images of bats, blood, drugs, and prostitutes? Well, you don’t have to. Egypt actually showed these adverts. In Asmaa director Amr Salama challenges the social prejudice towards HIV/AIDS suffers. Watch this film to learn about the limitations of being a HIV/AIDS patient and a woman in Egypt.
Why Watch Asmaa?
Follow the life of a woman with HIV battling against social prejudice in Egypt
Watch the film here on YouTube to start your adventure into Egyptian film
Experience a bit of life in Cairo and the country surrounding the capital
The Breakdown
First of all, it is important to know that there is a bit social stigma around the HIV positive in Egypt. The director, Amr Salama, states:
“In Egypt we think it’s a punishment from God and we should not treat it. We think that they get it from a sin so they deserve it, and we think it’s very contagious so we don’t deal with them in any way. So people die from that more than they die from anything else. “
Asmaa starts in a small HIV group, a bit like an alcoholics anonymous group. The director cuts between the group talking and scenes in a hospital. We find out that our protagonist Asmaa has HIV and was denied hospital treatment because of it.
Asmaa is a do it all mother. She looks after her father, her daughter, whilst working shifts at the airport. Through flash backs to her former life, we learn how she caught HIV and her former dreams. Her flashbacks are shown in golden colours which contrast with the dreary blue and grey filter that depicts her current life and her visits to the hospital. It is obvious she wishes to recapture the dreams of her early life with her former husband.
Conclusion
Asmaa is an important tale based on the true stories of many HIV/AIDS suffers that Salama met when filming a documentary before he filmed Asmaa. The film reveals the plight of women in Egypt as well as the social prejudice against HIV/AIDS patients. It challenges the controversial portrayal of HIV/AIDS in Egypt by putting you in the shoes of a strong woman coping with the disease.
Whilst we couldn’t attend AFI Fest 2023 in person, we were able to catch a wide range of screeners from the festival representing Asia, Latin America, Africa and Europe. Here’s a quick recap of the films we saw, starting with our personal favorites.
Our Top Three Films from AFI Fest 2023
Four Daughters (Tunisia)
Kaouther Ben Hania is back with more drama. Unlike her previous film, The Man Who Sold His Skin, Four Daughters is grounded in reality. Its authenticity and intimacy is granted by Olfa and her two daughters, who tell their family story with the help of actors playing their lost sisters within the confines of their four walls. Ben Hania encourages her cast to re-enact past trauma, like The Act of Killing, but on a more intimate scale, to create one of the most affecting movies of the year.
The Buriti Flower (Brazil)
2022 saw the release of National Geographic’s documentary The Territory, which followed the plight of indigenous people in the Brazilian rainforest. Whilst the documentary won awards for its coverage of deforestation and violence against indigenous people, The Buriti Flower tells it better. The Buriti Flower features the indigenous protagonists instead of processing their language and voices through mediators. In doing so, the Krahô are given a political voice and agency within their community and on the national scale.
Set Lam (La Reunion)
Just like Mami Wata and Faya Dayi, you’ll find dreamy monochromatic images in this short film set on the island of La Reunion. These visuals make the film memorable, especially the star-lit sky, and scenes in a pulsating night-club to contrast with the underwater abyss. It also contains mystical magic along the lines of Madagascar’s When the Stars Meet the Sea including a dance with death.
More Great Films from AFI Fest 2023
Terrestrial Verses (Iran)
Anyone familiar with Iranian film releases over the last few years will find a similar satirical portrayal of Iran’s Kafka-esque bureaucracy. Although the form of the film is nothing unique, the high standards of like-minded films such as There is No Evil and A Hero are also found on Terrestrial Verses. Each of the film’s vignettes are simply shot (one fixed camera for each with speakers off-screen) but highly engrossing.
City of Wind (Mongolia)
City of Wind covers the classic ‘tradition vs. modernity’ trope pretty well through its high-school coming-of-age romance. The setting stands out – Ulaanbaatar – which combines a mass of urban development with its rural, undeveloped outskirts, visualizing the encroaching development on tradition. Tradition is represented in a young shaman, balancing school with his cultural role as a ‘modern’ woman pulls him out of his focused life and into modernity. Will he or won’t he be the end of his cultural lineage?
The Settlers (Chile)
A bread-and-butter macho explorer’s film, The Settlers follows an unlikely trio’s journey across the uncharted tail of South America. Like in Godland, the landscape is portrayed brutally because of the unsavory protagonists that are traversing it – a Texan mercenary and ex-British soldier. The mixed-race Chilean that accompanies them, like the indigenous people of the region, is a victim of different guises of power, as conveyed in the film’s third act jab at the authenticity of Chilean nationhood.
The Rest – Featuring Quirkiness and Intimate Stories
Smoke Sauna Sisterhood (Estonia)
A documentary that takes place almost entirely in a sauna, Smoke Sauna Sisterhood captures intimate conversations between Estonian women. The focus of the film is on storytelling and not the visuals. Only a few of the storytellers are shown, and most of the shots are close ups of their bodies, rarely revealing a whole person. Whilst the visuals are limited, the stories become more and more dramatic, covering a wide range of the woman’s experience.
Cobweb (South Korea)
With Parasite, Song Kang-ho became the most famous Korean actor in the U.S. Whilst not directed by him, Cobweb is very much his film as his energy propels the heavy, but often funny, plot forward. It’s a chaotic satire of filmmaking, with Song Kang-ho playing a director convinced he just needs to re-shoot the ending of his film to turn it into a masterpiece to revive his stalling career.
Tiger Stripes (Malaysia)
Tiger Stripes is for fans of Carrie, Titane, and TV soaps/melodramas. It’s quirky body-transformation high-school coming-of-age plot just about works for audiences unfamiliar with Malaysian culture. However, this film is more of a blast for those in-tune with crazy Malaysian politics (Fictional Dr Rahim vs. Real King of Shamans), the power of TikTok, and the conservative wave in the country that will likely censor this film because of its sexuality (they almost censored a Coldplay concert).
Primetime Mother (Philippines)
A TV gameshow dream for a band of desperate mothers competing for money. However the dreams become exploitative nightmares as the mums are forced to sell their integrity for the gods of entertainment.
The Echo (Mexico)
This quiet documentary reminded me of Iliana Sosa’s What We Leave Behind and Chloe Zhao’s Songs My Brother Taught Me. It’s fairly bleak and doesn’t have a story that moves us through the melancholy, but is a very well-made portrait of remote Mexico.
As per previous years, the base was high for all the films we saw at AFI Fest 2023, so whilst we had our favorites, all of the above had their plaudits. Please find previous coverage of AFI Fest here.
AFI Fest continues to shine as one of the premiere film festivals in Los Angeles. The programmers do a great job of curating the best films from the 2024 festival circuit whilst introducing international films from first-time filmmakers that run along side the big red carpet premieres. The 2024 edition was no different. Outside of the camera grabbing U.S. features, there was a litany of international gems. Find a recap of our favorites below.
Our Top Three from AFI Fest 2024
1. Sujo (Mexico)
Sujo starts with narco-violence in remote Michoacan, so I was expecting this to become the latest pessimistic and bleak narco-flick that festivals have been gobbling up over the last ten years. However, this film explores an alternative narrative, in which Sujo (the son of a hit-man) is carefully guided away from his father’s fate despite all the temptations. His journey is posed as an allegory for the history of modern Mexico, in a similar way to Innaritu’s Bardo from 2023. It presents a hopeful future, despite a traumatic recent history and the plans of fate, with the help of dreams and magic.
2. La Cocina (Mexico/U.S.)
La Cocina is brimming with energy. It’s present in the editing, the acting, and the dialogue and makes the film captivating despite the small set. The lead dominates the camera with the control of his body, expressions, and voice to create a character you cannot look away from. Everything is captured brilliantly in this one-set recreation of a stage play. The only thing holding it back from being one of the greats is that it feels limited by the restrictions of the stage. It doesn’t quite feel like it has truly transferred from the stage to the cinematic medium (similar to the limited space in Birdman and Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom). Despite this, La Cocina is still one of the year’s most engrossing dramas.
3. No Other Land (Palestine/Israel)
Israel’s encroachments on Palestinian territory date back to the country’s formation. However, the encroachment is typically overshadowed by developments in the conflict in the international news. No Other Land intimately documents Basel Adra’s lifelong protest against Israeli settler encroachment. In the film, Basel is joined by a sympathetic Israeli that helps to publicize their struggle. The footage places you within their struggle, which is at times shocking and appears increasingly hopeless. However, Basel’s calm words encouraging patience for activists worldwide is the message everyone should take away from this enlightening documentary.
Honorable Mentions
Santosh (India)
Santosh is a gripping thriller that follows the plight of a police widower that takes her dead husbands job to stay afloat and gets caught in a web of sexism and classism. She battles with the prejudices of others as well as her own, as she seeks to re-right the wrongs done to her.
Second Chance (India)
A wonderfully low-key fish-out-of-water story featuring a city girl living in a home-stay in the Indian Himalayas. The humble way of life in the mountains helps to ground her after a tumultuous break-up so she can re-find herself before she returns to reality.
Viet and Nam (Vietnam)
The slowest film I watched at this years AFI Fest, Viet and Nam features a few narrative segments that each touch on the hopelessness of life in contemporary Vietnam. Whilst the message is bleak, the pictures are gorgeous, especially the dark shots deep in the mines which merge the underground with the celestial.
Thank You for Banking with Us! (Palestine)
This Palestinian family drama features a housewife that is pushed into a new lease of life with the help of her sister following the unexpected death of her father. Politics are in the background as the film centers on the awakening of an ordinary housewife overwhelmed by the expectations of her role as a woman and mother.
Another year, another great slate of films from AFI Fest. We strongly encourage everyone to check out next years edition. Please find previous coverage of AFI Fest here.
Outside of the red carpet film premieres and international film festival circuit darlings, there’s a diverse collection of short films screening at AFI Fest 2025. This is the section where you can find up-and-coming filmmakers aiming to make a name for themselves before they try their luck at a feature length film. It’s also the section where you can see the widest range of film styles. From hand-drawn animation to picturesque documentaries, deeply personal stories paired to dark comedies, there’s something for everyone. Plus as AFI Fest is a qualifying film festival for the short film awards at the Academy Awards, you might just see a future Academy Award winner without expecting it.
Here’s our highlights from the short films at AFI Fest 2025.
The Best Short Films at AFI Fest 2025
Pavilhão (Brazil)
I love short films which take you on a journey into another culture. When you’ve finished watching Pavilhão it feels like you’ve taken a small trip to Brazil and immersed yourself in the world of Samba. The visuals guide you from Samba’s African origins through to the joyous dance and music of the present day carnival culture. Watch to become an honorary part of the movement.
Water Sports (Philippines)
Heat exhausts people mentally and physically. In Manila, a group of high school students go stir crazy in this sexualized social-media-influenced fever dream. Short TikTok style video clips fit the physical context perfectly – who can concentrate in a heat wave – whilst disturbingly colored bottles of water paired with TV hosts telling everyone to stay hydrated convey the city’s inability to confront current and future climate disasters. In Water Sports, all you can do in the face of impending disaster is laugh.
Beneath Which Rivers Flow (Iraq)
Some short films focus completely on the cinematography to craft some truly spectacular shots. Beneath Which Rivers Flow is one of those short films. The look of the film reminded me of Notturno – a beautifully shot documentary feature from AFI Fest 2020 that relied on the visual power of the images to move it’s audience. There’s no dialogue in Beneath Which Rivers Flow as it’s power, like Notturno, comes from the carefully framed shots of the drying marshlands and it’s impact on human life.
My Wonderful Life (Singapore)
If carefully framed shots of natural landscapes is not your thing, and you’re looking for a critique of modern work/life balance and the patriarchal pressure on modern mothers with ever-escalating animated body-horror, My Wonderful Life delivers. The South Park-style animation of an overworked Singaporean mum pushes itself into dark comedy to prove its point.
S The Wolf (Egypt)
Simple, hand-drawn animation can be hugely effective. Just see Don Hertzfeldt’s It’s Such a Beautiful Day. Moving away from the pop-art shock-factor animation of My Wonderful Life, S the Wolf‘s simple hand drawn style is the perfect medium for a stream of consciousness journey through a collection of hair related personal memories. Each short anecdote opens a window into the director’s childhood and explores his relationship with his father accompanied with plenty of deadpan banter.
Once In A Body (Colombia)
Have you ever been to hell!? Like S The Wolf, Once In A Body takes you on a highly personal trip through animation. However, this short swaps humor and hand-drawn style for an exploration of trauma in drawings that dynamically transform from faces and bodies to a literal visit to hell as our narrators journey to hell and back.
Petra and the Sun (Chile)
Stop motion puppets are a unique animation choice. They’re not my favorite style as I find something creepy and deceitful about the uncanny way they look and move. For Petra And The Sun, puppets are the perfect choice to add to the creepy story in which a lonely woman hides her necrophilia as the seasons change and the world gets warmer.
We strongly encourage everyone to check out AFI Fest next year. Please find previous coverage of AFI Fest here and check the official AFI Fest website for news on next year’s schedule!
Here’s your chance. In the spirit of the epic Soviet films from Sergei Eisenstein, The Great Warrior Skanderbeg does not disappoint. Yes, there are heavily stereotyped characters and a lot of nationalism, but there is also epic battles and even arm wrestling. If you’re up for watching something epic with an epic action movie character (think Conan the Barbarian) this one is for you. You can even watch it here on YouTube!
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