Where is Dad? (in development)
Supported by Onassis Foundation and EKKOMED (Greek Film Center).
This is the story of my family, a story of migration, survival and return to memory that intersects with the collective experience of generations of separation and invisibility. A connection between the first generation forced into silence and the second generation claiming to speak.
I was born in 1984 in a small Greek-speaking village in Albania. On 18 November 1990 my father left for work in the morning and did not return home in the evening. For some days the whole village was looking for him. I persistently asked “Where is Dad?” After some time my father contacted us and informed us that he had arrived in Greece. To do this he had to walk a mountain in the winter, hide in various places and finally cross the border “illegally”. My mother and I arrived shortly afterwards with a one-way plane ticket. So we found ourselves in a small apartment in Piraeus to restart our lives, without ever talking about what we left behind, what we were deprived of, what dangers we faced, what we escaped and what we hoped for. We never talked about our past, when it clearly defined us in the present. My parents had to work hard, often in terms of unpaid and uninsured labour, and I grew up cut off from the care of the wider family environment.
It took many years, many years of personal and collective processing, to return to the silenced and fragmented history of my family and to realize the unspoken weight of family trauma. I was able to do so when I found the tools to integrate my personal history into the large but unknown history of Albanian migration to Greece. The stream of Albanian migration to Greece is the most massive one the country has received. According to official estimates, 700,000 Albanian immigrants arrived in Greece in the 1990s, having a catalytic effect on the productive process. Today it is considered a successful model of integration. However, behind this codification lies the violence of racism, black labour and shame.
The documentary “Where’s Dad?” is the visualization of our family history, mine and my father’s, a story of returning to place, to memory, to trauma in an axis of claiming speech and healing.
