theartsdesk in Durrës: Albania after Norman Wisdom

Once upon a time - and for a very long time, at that, under its hard-line Marxist leader, Enva Hoxha - world cinema was represented in Albania by Norman Wisdom. Today, 26 years after Hoxha's death and 21 years after the fall of Communism there, Durrës, the country's second largest city, has just hosted an international film festival whose guests included Francis Ford Coppola, Jiří Menzel and Claudia Cardinale. Times are changing, it would seem, and Albania is emerging at last from its wretched isolation into sophisticated cosmopolitan glamour. Though not quite as quickly or smoothly as everyone had hoped.

Beneath the golden gladiator, which is the festival's emblem, posters bear the legend, "Art, my city's surname!" This event is designed to promote Durrës's image as a hotbed of thrilling creativity. Yet a more diffident note is struck in the official programme by Vangjush Dako, the Mayor of Durrës, whose financial support makes the festival possible. "We saw the festival as something that would rebuild people's trust in the city," Dako says there.

Thomas Logoreci, an American-Albanian film teacher who is married to an Albanian and has lived in Durrës for seven years, puts it more pungently. He describes the art scene as, in a word, "bleak". What passes for culture, he says, are the 70-odd shoestring television channels (every tinpot town has one) pumping out local news and music shows and, in Durrës, a beach resort that attracts mainly mass tourism from Tirana, the ubiquitous, round-the-clock dull thump of Eighties Eurodisco (pictured above).

Hoxha might be dead but his ghost lingers. In Durrës some people refer to him simply as "the dictator". He Who Must Not Be Named. The catastrophic crash of a national pyramid investment scheme, which wrecked the economy in 1997, didn't help, of course; nor did the failed coup in January of this year. "Over 20 years after the collapse of Communist rule, Albania is still in a state of transition," Logoreci says. He sighs. "People feel a bit helpless in the face of the Western corporate noise."

Durrës doesn't have a cinema. The festival holds its screenings in an adapted cultural centre and in the city's First-century Roman amphitheatre, its ancient, battered jewel which was the largest such structure in the Balkans and is a current candidate for UNESCO's World Heritage programme (photograph: Joonas Lyytinen for Wikimedia Commons).

Unlike similar arenae in, say, Orange, Arles or Taormino, Durrës's amphitheatre is not a manicured monument. To accede to it, you go up rickety stone steps leading off a street of lively bars, then dive down a dark back alley into the grass-covered ruins overlooked at close range by a ring of modern houses.

As the films unfurl, car headlights swivel up on the rim of the arena, while the locals ride bikes, lean on the wall to chat and generally go about their ordinary business. At 9pm sharp the muezzin from a nearby mosque chimes up to accompany the soundtrack. It's a similar story over at the Rotonda, a 15th-century tower turned into a cocktail bar (with thumping Eurodisco music). You don't know whether to lament Durrës's lack of regard for its history or, on the other hand, to admire the way it has been casually, effortlessly incorporated into the modern city.

Under Communism, a hundred-odd films were made in Albania a year. Today, it is one or two. And sometimes none at all. Amnesty, a contemporary drama, made a small, guardedly positive impression earlier this year at a handful of festivals. In Durrës, the patriotic banner is borne by a couple of movies by Albanians based in America, a retrospective and two programmes of student work.

The country has two film schools whose hopeful graduates haunt the festival, though their future may not be as desperate as it sounds, believes Nik Powell, the respected British producer (Scandal; The Crying Game) who is now the head of the National Film and Television School. Especially round here, where frontiers and affiliations are, to say the least, fluid, you need to think beyond national boundaries, Powell thinks, and Albania is well positioned to take its place as a co-production partner within a nexus of Balkan countries.

The change is long overdue after 40 years under Hoxha's iron rule. Yet according to Ismail Kadare, the country's most distinguished writer, now based in Paris, the West is partly to blame for the country's decade-long quarantine. "The West forgave Tito and helped Yugoslavia, but it did not forgive Hoxha," Kadare told The Independent in a 1999 interview.

"When Hoxha broke with the Soviet Union in 1962 he was ready to turn to Europe, but he was rejected, so he made an absurd short-lived alliance with China," Kadere continued. "When that went wrong he built thousands of anti-nuclear pill-boxes, which he knew were useless, but he wanted to create a fear-psychosis. Albania suffered longer than any other Eastern European country." (Bunkers, old and modern, on the beach. Photograph: Edal Anton Lefterov for Wikimedia Commons.)

In search of the outside world, people would put antennae on their roofs or terraces at night to suck up Italian and Yugoslav television (taking them down, of course, before daybreak). Sir Norman, symbol of the uppity underdog, was reportedly the only Western actor whose films were permitted - Tirana awarded him the Freedom of the City in 1995. When he died in 2010, Sali Berisha, Albania's Prime Minister, wrote to his family, "I was deeply saddened to hear about the death of one of the greatest actors of world comedy, a particular favourite actor of Albanian audiences and one of the dearest friends of our nation."

We hurtle down the highway in a cloud of exhaust fumes (under Hoxha private car ownership was banned; now every household runs three or four of them) towards Tirana, the most polluted capital city in Europe. Around us, instead of bunkers, high-rise buildings are erupting everywhere, sometimes only yards apart. Before too long Durrës and Tirana, currently separated by 30 miles of strip development, will melt into one smoky, sprawling conurbation, believes the director Kujtim Çashku, whose films include Colonel Bunker (1998) about... well, you have one guess.

Çashku wants to show us Albania's first film school, which he founded in 2004. The Academy of Film and Multimedia Marubi (named after the 19th-century photographer Pietro Marubi) sits in between Tirana's film studios and its archive, in one of the very few green spots left in the city. Planted with olive and pine trees, its peaceful gardens are dotted with student artwork such as an installation of padlocks and barbed wire that commemorates the school's darkest hour.

In 2009 the Marubi Academy was the site of clashes with police and private security forces originating in plans to turn the gardens - which are at present used for film screenings, jazz concerts and earnest alfresco discussions on the past and future of cinema - into a car park. The confrontations rumbled on for weeks; thousands of international names including Gus Van Sant, Nick Broomfield, Richard Linklater, Abel Ferrara and DA Pennebaker spoke out in support of the school.

Çashku was arrested and roughed up by police: the violence is recorded in a strip of images in front of the academy. But at least he had the sweet satisfaction of seeing his adversary, the "Minister of Anti-Culture" Ylli Pango, sacked after a Berlusconi-like interlude in which a leaked tape allegedly captured him asking a female candidate for a ministry post to take off her shirt and show him how she looked in a bikini. Today the school is bright, light and surprisingly well equipped. Over the entrance to its screening room is a photograph of two other celebrated actors with an Albanian connection, the Belushi brothers.

Back in Durrës, under the artistic directorship of Anila Varfi (who is also the wife of the Deputy Mayor), the festival runs its short course from 27 July to 2 September, deploying smoke, mirrors and all the wiles at its disposal to eke out a minuscule budget. Coppola gives a much-appreciated two-hour masterclass, in which he recalls working in Yugoslavia as a young assistant on one of Roger Corman's exploitation movies, and wondering about the fortress-nation across the border. Remarkably, an Albanian connection is somehow found for Cardinale too: she introduces the closing night film, Federico Fellini's 8½. It was one of Hoxha's favourite movies (like many dictators he was a film buff and had his own private print of Fellini's masterpiece), but had never before been shown publicly in Albania. In film, as in music, the country has a lot of catching up to do. By a nice coincidence, the golden gladiator goes to Vincere, a film about Benito Mussolini.