Tomka and His Friends

Xhanfize Keko was a founding member of the New Albania Film Studio in 1952 and the sole woman directing feature films in Communist Albania. She had a long career making documentaries and features, most of them focused on children, and was one of the most popular directors of the 1970s. Yet despite a prolific career, she is almost unknown outside of her home country. One reason, suggests film historian Mark Cousins, is that, "As it was a woman making children's cinema she wasn't considered important." But as the Austrian Film Museum proclaimed in its 2019 tribute, "Keko's unique exploration into the lives of children has elevated the Albanian director to a pivotal position in her country's undiscovered cinema." Tomka and His Friends, perhaps the director's most celebrated film, follows a group of adolescent boys in a mountain village under Nazi occupation in World War II. Keko had developed a way of working with child actors over the years and continued the practice through Tomka. She scouted non-professionals from schools and developed a relationship with them (they would call her "Teta Xhano"), observing their behavior and adapting her script to fit their personalities and strengths. Enea Zhegu, the young actor playing the title character Tomka, was the only professional in the cast of children. Zhegu remembers nervously awaiting his audition when "Teta Xhano came to me and said, 'Enea, I decided not to have you do a try out for the role of Tomka because I am convinced that you can do it better than anyone else.'" We can see Tomka and His Friends today thanks in part to Library of Congress Film Preservation Lab, which preserved the film in 2015 in coordination with the Albanian National Film Archive and the Albanian Cinema Project.

by Sean Axmaker

Sources:
The Albanian Cinema Project
Austrian Film Museum
Library of Congress
"Mark Cousins: A story of childhood and film," Carmen Gray. Dazed, April 4, 2014.