WE ALL DIE NAKED

Director’s statement

WE ALL DIE NAKED is our personal expression of the often absurd circumstances we all experience in our contemporary world, caught as we are between a traumatic past and a future that evades us. Our intention is to take a well-known genre, the road movie, and subvert it into something specifically Albanian. We will use it to explore Albania's majestic yet little-known features, while also capturing the often absurd situations that arise. This journey through the southern Balkans, taken by our lead characters, the Albanian MARK and the Italian CESAR, will also be illuminated by the cast of supporting characters they will meet along the way. Their contradictory nature often creates a painful sense of confusion and alienation, which embodies the anxiety and fractures of our modern existence. Albania might hardly seem like the ideal place to seek peace and tranquility, yet the enormous difficulties our characters undergo bring about such deep individual transformations; quite possibly the closest thing to hope and redemption we can express at this point in our country’s path. As a creative team, we continually draw inspiration from the sum history of Albanian culture. For us, it is of crucial importance to pay homage to all that has come before. It is this heritage that helps us understand how art and life intersect. That's why one theme that will continue from our award-winning feature debut film Bota will be the references to classic Albanian music and most of all, to the cinema from the old Kinostudio era. This will include the casting of iconic Albanian character actors such as Mirush Kabashi and Eva Alikaj. It is vital for us to establish these associations that Albanian audiences have with the beloved presences of this country’s cinema. The camera in We All Die Naked will be unsteady, quick, and chaotic at times, to better manifest the spiritual journey experienced by our main characters, Mark and Cesar, travelling across the Balkan's legendary lush and vivid landscape.