Women

My first trip to Boge was in the spring of 1998. This is a tiny village nestled in the Malsia e Madhe mountains north of Shkoder in northern Albania. We were location scouting my new movie Women Without Wings, a Canadian feature film story involving Albanian virgins. I was the director, writer and producer of this exotic adventure.

Boge is the last village in a long winding valley up against a mountain wall, the Shtegut-Dhenvet with a pass at 5,500 feet above sea level. The pass takes the traveller over the mountain and down to Thethi, a lovely old communist resort town in the leafy valley beyond. Boge was perfect for logistical reasons since we would be just an hour away from a mountain top where a large part of the movie would be shot.

Filmmaking is all about logistics. Shooting locations must be as close together as possible to minimise travel time. Lodging, meals, transportation, etc. are the bane of the production manager. This is where you win or lose a movie. Bad planning means that you must compromise the shooting schedule and often the movie. If you don't have sufficient time to get all the scenes shot, you must cut them out of the script and by so doing you generally end up with a much inferior product. This is a heart-breaking process for a lot of directors.

Boge had a mountain top, a village church for cover sets (interiors when it rains), and lots of very rustic and ancient dwellings (interiors and exteriors) which could be used in the movie. The only other real choice was the village of Tamare, even more secluded and across the mountain. So we pitched our hopes on Boge knowing that we would have day trips to Tamare to complete the film. In addition, we planned to shoot in the city of Shkoder (about a two-hour drive south) which would double for the capital, Tirana.

BOGE

We needed to find lodging for our people in the village of Boge. We were hoping that a house or two could be converted into sleeping quarters for the cast and crew of the movie. We had heard that Boge was visited by Czech speleologists two years earlier and was quite well known in Eastern Europe for their limestone caves. We were sure, however, that they had never seen a film crew. So the first step was to meet with the village people. When my unit manager, Florenc Cani, and I approached the house through the vineyard, I was having mixed feelings. How were these people going to receive us?

We were immediately invited inside the house by the daughter for coffee and raki (excellent kind of eau de vie tasting vaguely of plums). The house was a large stone dwelling with a patio overlooking an enclosed vineyard and a dry creek in the front with a fantastic view of the mountains. We were soon ensconced on an old sofa in a living area reminiscent of the 1940s or 50s. with a large fireplace for cooking. After a while the old man of the house appeared and sat with us watching me very closely. The daughter then popped the question. What was a foreigner like me doing in Boge? Learning that I was a harmless Canadian from North America, the old man laughed loudly. When we had approached the house, the old man had been convinced that I was a Serb and was about to get his gun. Serbs were not welcome in Albania in 1998.

We quickly fixed on Boge and eventually found two houses to rent in the village. In one we put in a new bathroom and propane heaters for the cast and crew. We were also very lucky to find Gelosh Olaj and his brother Melosh who owned most of the land above Boge all the way up to the Shtegut-Dhenvet mountain. Gelosh and Melosh are tough mountain men who run a herd of sheep up and down the valley from March to December. They lived together with their families in the bariaktar's kula (traditional Albanian house with narrow windows for protection) with open-fire cooking, no toilets and no running water.

Albanians are proud and their hospitality knows no limit. Soon we were borrowing Gelosh's house, family, furniture and private stock of raki to shoot the movie and Gelosh and his brother were enjoying every minute of it. Gelosh's uncle was the old village bariaktar (elder) who owned the Olaj estate. One day during shooting the bariaktar and his daughter, who lives in London, came around to visit Gelosh and family. It was a cold November day and it felt very good just to sit there near the fire with Gelosh's niece in between takes and talking about London. Albanian families are close knit and they all seem to have family members spread around the globe who help them financially. So there was the Olaj family: Gelosh, a 48-year old still spry mountain man living in a 19^th century house while his niece lives in a flat in London with hot and cold water. This is Albania today, so full of life’s contradictions.

During the eight-week shoot that started in mid-October 2000 we had some wonderful moments with Gelosh's family. We immediately hired Gelosh to play the role of the mountain guide and he was perfect for it even down to his clothes. His wife and children were to participate as extras in numerous scenes. One day Gelosh invited us to a celebration in his house. A sheep had been butchered and cooked on a spit over the fire. When we arrived, the director of photography, the soundman and myself, were given the best seats at the table. After an enormous meal with sheep parts that I had never eaten before, the party became a long series of toasts offered by Gelosh and by our people with some very eloquent speeches for our advanced state of drunkenness and sometimes punctuated by wild laughter. Each toast seemed to be another opportunity for a drink.

With us at the party was the excellent Albanian actress, Besa Imani, who at seventy-years old, had started her career in the theatre in Tirana in the early fifties. Besa who played Gjelina, the old gun-toting grandmother in the picture, always amazed me by finding little things to improve her role from take to take and, of course, she never ever did two takes the same way. Most directors would have been driven up the wall by Besa but I found her performances added so much to certain scenes that she improved the entire movie. That night I offered a toast to Besa for her excellent performance in the movie and explained how I appreciated the subtle ways she always found for improving on her role. Besa was enchanted by this gesture and it made her evening. Albanian directors, most of them men, are not often seen handing out compliments to their actresses and this was really quite a very special moment for Besa.

TAMARE

The worst day of the shoot was without a doubt the day we shot in Tamare which is a village located in a very inaccessible valley about two hours north of Shkoder. To get there, you drive on a gravel road that clings to a mountain so steep that even goats have trouble climbing up and down. The winding road follows the clear turquoise Cijevna river up a steep valley with the border to Montenegro just a stone's throw away. Tamare is perhaps the most lawless part of Albania where blood feuds go unpunished and the hand of the law is all but invisible.

It was in Tamare that we planned to shoot the town square scene where the Canadian girl Marije arrives to meet her young Albanian cousins. Our assistant art-director, Eduard, had built a fountain to fit the middle of the square and this was supposed to require several hours to assemble on the morning of the shoot. I had my doubts about the fountain and Eduard's capacity to make it look real in such a short time. In addition, we were going to need Gelosh's horse which would have to travel there in the back of a truck.

Our plan was to leave early and shoot there all day returning to Boge in the evening. We had been unsuccessful finding lodging in the village and security was not good. Furthermore, I have been warned by our unit manager Florenc that it would be very dangerous to leave Tamare after dark which in the month of November comes early in the mountains. So through a friend in the Ministry of Interior, Florenc had hired three armed guards and a 4-wheel drive vehicle to provide security after the shoot was over.

Everything looked good until we arrived in Tamare at around 9:30 AM in the morning. The square was already full of local people who had clearly heard that we were coming. Eduard was busy with a local man assembling an enormous wooden monument that looked more like a fountain for the City of Rome in the best days of the empire than for a tiny village in Albania. As soon as I saw it, I knew that Eduard's fountain had to go. There was no way to justify the size of the thing and just the painting to hide the assembled parts would have taken two days at least to make it look realistic.

It was now 10:00 AM and crew and cast were ready to shoot. We would have no more than four hours of shooting to complete the required scenes and leave in time with our armed guards. No time to waste. So I immediately went over to see Eduard and with Florenc's help broke the news. He was to reload the fountain immediately onto the truck and get the hell out of there. The fountain was gone but where were we going to sit Marije as she waited for her cousins after arriving in the village in an open truck? I had noticed entering the village some large pieces of weathered lumber sitting in front of a house. Florenc quickly negotiated the rental and we had a bench installed near a tree ready for the scene in less than ten minutes. So the problem of the fountain was quickly resolved.

Now where was Gelosh and Luigj's truck with our horse? Ivan Gekoff, the d.o.p. and I decided it was time to relax and have a coffee at the bar. Nervously, one of us would exit the bar every few minutes to watch the road for Luigj. We had finished our coffee and just as we were coming out, we saw Luigj's truck bearing down on us at high speed and showing very little concern for the local pedestrians and the numerous pigs milling around. Inside the truck we could see the happy faces of Luigi in the driver's seat with Gelosh standing in the back holding onto the horse. Then we watched in horror and, as is the case in these things, the action seemed to slow down as a pig ran across the road just in front of the truck and seeing it, Luigj stamped his foot down hard on the accelerator and aimed his massive truck at it. The pig was almost across, but at the very last moment its hind legs got caught under the axle of the truck and the wheels ran over the pig. Luigj braked and jumped out of the truck grinning from ear to ear.

At that moment Ivan and I nearly had heart failure. Florenc ran over to the two drunks in the truck and the angry owner of the pig while Ivan and I retired to the bar for a shot of raki. I then thought that the pig was the end of it. We might as well pack it all in and try again another day. An angry local can cause incredible havoc with a shooting schedule. It appeared later that owner had simply sold the injured pig to Luigj and then butchered for him on the spot. It was simply another business deal and there was no need to get upset about it.

So now we had a horse and a public bench and we were ready to go. The only problem remaining was how to clear the square so that we could shoot a movie there. A local man had parked his SUV in the middle of the square and had turned up the sound on the boom box which now filled the square with pounding rock music. When Florenc asked this tough guy nicely to move his vehicle (obviously earned with contraband dollars), he stubbornly refused. This was his town after all. We were trespassers.

We had come here for the town square and we needed a quiet empty square to shoot in. Florenc had introduced me to the local policeman whose job was to maintain the peace but no enforcement was expected of him, at least not in these parts. Florenc convinced the man to talk to the SUV troublemaker, a cousin of his, asking him politely to respect the village chief's agreement with us concerning the use of the town square. After some ten minutes of heated discussion the SUV man left and we now had the square mostly to ourselves and a crowd of some fifty villagers looking on. It was quite unsettling shooting the action of Marije (played by Katya Gardner of Toronto) arriving in the empty square on the back of a truck with a crowd of fifty people, young and old, watching the scene and reacting just like they would in the cinema. They laughed, pointed at the actors, and had a great time even after my soundman had yelled for silence. For most of them this was a movie, just like any other film on celluloid projected on a big screen.

By 3:30 PM we had finished the shoot and I was elated. We had finished just in time the last shot, a tight reaction shot of Marije in close-up sitting under an umbrella held by the make-up girl while the rain poured down. There was no doubt in my mind that my guardian angel had been there for me that day. To have overcome all these problems in such a short time was amazing.

But there was still the road back. It was already dark and raining heavily when we finished a quick lunch in the bar. Florenc and the guards were now very nervous. We had entertained everyone in town with our movie and the word was out. It was the perfect night for a holdup. Two or three men with kalashnikovs would be sufficient and I had some 5,000 USD on my person. We paid the bill and hurried back through the rain to the trucks. The convoy consisted of four vehicles with the bodyguards in a 4x4 vehicle bringing up the rear. We had our walkie-talkies so that I in the lead vehicle could communicate immediately with Florenc in the guard vehicle if we ran into any trouble. This would give our guards advance notice of any suspicious activity on the road.

We raced south over the Cijevna river bridge in the rain and were soon climbing on a winding road up the mountain. After some fifty minutes we reached the summit bathed in afternoon sunshine from the west and heaved a sigh of relief. We paid off our security guards and started down the mountain to the coast happy to have completed a major sequence in the movie.

For several weeks our luck held and we had few incidents to report. One major worry was our continued presence in Shkoder and the reputation of the Albanian mafia there. Kidnapping of women is their specialty. This was no joke and Florenc had made the argument several times with me about the danger of letting blond Katya and our Albanian wardrobe person shop around town without any male security. The mafia were very busy in Shkoder. Albanian girls would be pulled off the street in seconds, drugged, and loaded onto a fast boat for Italy where they would simply disappear for years, sold into prostitution. In our case this would be disastrous not only for the actress but also for the movie.

Shkoder was a tough town. We decided that we would be harder to target if we kept all information about our movements to ourselves. If anyone knew where we were going from one day to the next, it would be easy to surprise us. One day we would shoot in the streets, the next we would be gone unannounced at dawn. We also decided to watch the hotel exterior for any obvious surveillance. The only incident we had in Shkoder was a bunch of rough kids who teased Katya with the occasional blast of a pellet gun while we were shooting an elaborately staged traffic jam. Katya was very upset when she received a lead pellet on her leg but she remained steadfast in front of the camera and her performance was, as usual, impeccable. In this scene she had to jump out of a taxi pursued by an Albanian thug and then when accosted, seize a can of pepper spray and blast him in the face with it. This looked simple but the reality was a little more complicated. Katya has to seize a can of perfume in her handbag, position her hand on it correctly and then spray to the left of the young Albanian actor. We got two good takes of the scene and each time Katya’s aim and performance were perfect.

BACK TO BOGE

The last week of shooting was in Boge. The snow was on the mountain tops and the dry creek was a raging flood for several days. We still had several important scenes to do and we were one week over our original schedule. On the last day we had decided to shoot the execution scene in a farmhouse on the other side of the creek. This was just opposite the local school and playground, about a hundred yards from where our three trucks were parked. We had done several scenes with our Albanian actors when suddenly we heard the voice of a crazy man near the trucks. He was yelling insults at us and seemed to be mad about some lack of respect for the village church where we had shot several scenes in the preceding weeks. After a while he went away and then returned with an axe which he used to systematically destroy all the windows of our trucks (a total of 17 windows were shattered).

We were armed, as always, and our man Gelosh was ready to put a bullet in his head but you don't do that kind of thing easily in Albania. The man's death would have meant one more blood feud between the families and already this crazy man had killed two other men in similar situations. Our drivers ran to their trucks and managed to get them away without injury. After another ten minutes of raving and ranting, the crazy man of Boge disappeared.

The young Canadian crew was seriously shaken by this incident and several wanted to leave on the spot. They were due to drive back to Shkoder and then on to Tirana (a five-hour run) to catch a plane the following morning. We had several more scenes to do and just about an hour of daylight left. The camera truck was gone and we had no more film in the camera. We needed to reload but no one wanted to risk crossing the riverbed with a nut running loose. I set off avoiding the school playground area where the incident had occurred and managed to find the truck hidden in the backyard of a house up the valley. I then ran back to the set and we set up again in the failing light. The last scene of the executed men was shot within minutes of complete darkness. We called it a day and left in a large group of actors and technicians carrying our equipment and hugging the creek with Florenc bringing up the rear armed with a pistol. My assistant cameraman and I were so happy to leave that we hauled the 55-pound Arriflex 35BLII fully loaded with zoom on our shoulders half a mile down the valley.

Back at the main house, we called Tirana on the satellite phone and requested police assistance. Two hours later, we had a visit from the police detachment at Koplik, an hour's drive down the road. Three men entered our tiny production office armed with kalashnikovs and dumped them down on our plastic picnic table as our housekeeper Tina served us coffee and raki. They told us that they had already captured the crazy man and were sorry for the inconvenience. I later learned that they had disarmed the man on their way up and, while we were chatting in the office, they were beating him up at the end of the road.. After the raki a police detective started to write up his report on the incident but by this time we had a major revolt among our drivers.

The plan was for them to leave for Shkoder that night with the Canadian cast and crew and then drive to Rinas Airport in the morning. I was to spend another week with Florenc shooting various scenes with the Albanian crew. With one voice the three drivers said no. They were not going. They wanted immediate guarantees concerning the broken windows of their trucks. No money, no driving.

The first thing you learn in Eastern Europe and in Albania, in particular, is everything is negotiable. You deal hard and you don't give in easily. So there we were, having to negotiate a future payment on the broken windows or no drivers were going to leave Boge that night. We started by saying no, then we gave a bit, and a bit more. And finally, after midnight, we got an agreement after our police detective intervened on our behalf. So off went the Canadian cast and crew.

The incident made headlines in Tirana: a Canadian film crew attacked in Boge! The Canadian Embassy office was immediately alerted but had no way to reach us. The following day our commissioner in Shkoder heard the news directly from our crew and told the Embassy office that no one was hurt.

The next week the weather warmed up and I had a relaxing time with the Albanian crew shooting several short pickup scenes. We still had to shoot a scene of young Zef (the Albanian virgin as a young girl) in the village. We had cast a young actress, Lucjana Vata, from Shkoder for the role of young Zef. She was perfect for the role and looked a good deal like our Canadian actress, Micheline Lanctôt, who plays the mature Albanian virgin so convincingly in the movie. Micheline had learned to speak Albanian with a coach in Montreal and she was totally credible in the role.

The problem was who would play the young sister. This is a scene when the two sisters are separated, one remaining in the village as a virgin and the other fleeing an unwanted marriage to eventually end up in Canada. The scene called for the two girls to physically act out their anguish without any text. Not an easy task for any actress, even great talents have trouble with this kind of scene. We had cast several girls in this role at the Tirana School of Drama during the preceding summer but none of them were now available and a return to Shkoder to look for an actress would take time. So we started to look around at the village girls to see whether any of them might be able to act. A desperate measure to say the least.

We met with one of the local girls but I felt that she looked too young for the role. One of the boys told us that his sister would do it. Yes, but can she act I asked him. "She do it", he says if I say so. Well, that was reassuring I thought. The brother was more than confident.

The following morning the brother came around with his sister, Terezima Rakaj, to meet Lucjana, Florenc and I. She looked absolutely perfect for the role. A tough-looking peasant girl with dark eyebrows. But could she act? We put her through her paces with Lucjana. The two girls seemed to work well together. Terezima had never acted in her life but the way she moved her body pushing her sister away roughly with a stern peasant look about her convinced me that we wouldn't find anybody better than her in Tirana nor even in Canada. It is worth noting here than Albanians are very natural in front of the camera and even the kids seem to act effortlessly.

So that afternoon in the fading pink light from the mountains we shot a day-for-night scene of the separation of the two sisters. We did three takes with rudimentary sound. Our Albanian props person held the microphone boom while our wardrobe person slated the scene. And then a wonderful thing happened in front of the lens, Lucjana and Terezima became those two simple peasant girls who were to be separated forever. As her sister leaves in the obscurity, Lucjana emitted this high pitched wail that seemed so natural and sent a shiver up your spine as it bounced off the mountain tops.

We left Boge finally in the rain after a gruelling day negotiating final payments to some very hard-nosed village people. We were happy to leave the discomfort of wintry Boge and had made plans to leave early but again we were caught driving at night. This time, however, we were not so lucky. The truck which had all our camera equipment and luggage broke down half-way down the mountain road. While we shivered in the truck, Florenc found a truck driver in a village who was willing to tow us all the way down to the main road and from there we made our way to Shkoder arriving thoroughly exhausted in the early morning hours.

© Nicholas Kinsey, Quebec, Canada 2003