Generationen von Bildern / 16mm / Sound / 2025 / 103min

"Wir singen ein Schlaflied, nicht um es in den Schlaf zu wiegen,
dieses riesige Baby aus Eisen und Beton.
Wir singen ein Schlaflied, damit es stärker wird
und die Revolution unaufhaltsam voranschreiten kann."

Ein Gedicht als Weckruf zur Revolution, oder doch ein regimetreues Schlaflied? GENERATIONEN VON BILDERN unternimmt eine Spurensuche durch die tiefgreifenden Transformationsprozesse albanischer Geschichte.
In den Archiven, vergessenen Orten und Erinnerungen verschiedener Generationen werden Brüche und Kontinuitäten sichtbar, die der Übergang von der kommunistischen Diktatur in die kapitalistische Demokratie hinterlassen hat. GENERATIONEN VON BILDERN findet dabei eine eigene Sprache Regimebilder und Bilderregime zu untersuchen. Es ist die Sprache der Poesie, die sich der Logik und Linearität herkömmlicher Geschichtsschreibung verweigert, Widersprüchliches zulässt und sich als Gedanke ebenso wie als Handlung ausdrückt. Sie ermöglicht es, Bilder nicht nur zu betrachten, sondern selbst sprechen zu lassen, neue Bedeutungen zu finden und dahinterliegende Erzählungen hervorzubringen. So formen sich Generationen von Bildern zu einem vielschichtigen und vielstimmigen Geschichtsbild, das oft weniger über Vergangenheit als vielmehr über ein ambivalentes Verhältnis zu ihr erzählt und aufzeigt, wie tief die Spuren der Geschichte in das Gewebe der Gegenwart eingeschrieben sind.

"We sing a lullaby, not to lull to sleep,
this giant baby of iron and concrete.
We sing a lullaby so it grows stronger and upon it,
incessantly the revolution can walk."

A poem as a wake-up call for revolution, or rather a regime-compliant lullaby? GENERATIONS OF IMAGES embarks on a search for traces through the profound transformation processes of Albanian history. In the archives, forgotten places, and memories of different generations, ruptures and continuities become visible, left behind by the transition from communist dictatorship to capitalist democracy. GENERATIONS OF IMAGES finds its own language to analyse regime images and image regimes. It is the language of poetry that rejects the logic and linearity of conventional historiography, allows for contradictions and expresses itself as both thought and action. It makes it possible not only to look at images, but to let them speak for themselves, to find new meanings and to create underlying narratives. In this way, generations of images form a multi-layered and polyphonic picture of history, which often tells less about the past than about an ambivalent relationship to it and shows how deeply the traces of history are inscribed in the fabric of the present.

∣ Credits ∣

A film by Johannes Gierlinger
Assistent & Researcher: Mira Klug ∣ Assistent in Albanien, Researcher: Eros Dibra Production management: Lara Bellon ∣ Sound: Mira Klug, Jan Zischka ∣ 
Translation: Sara Kraja ∣ English Adaption: Thomas Logoreci ∣ 
German Adaption: Anjeza Cikopano ∣  Music Performer: Benjman Klug & Gökan Arslan Music Composition: Johannes Gierlinger ∣ Colors: Mira Klug ∣ Sound Mixing: Florian Kindlinger ∣ Producer: Johannes Gierlinger & Lara Bellon 

Supported by Bmkoes, Land Salzburg, Cine Art Styria, Stadt Wien

∣ Festivals ∣
43rd BFM Bergamo Film Meeting - Close Up Section, 2025, Italy
Diagonale Graz, 2025, Austria
Kino Otok – Isola Cinema International Film Festival, 2025, Slovenia
IFFI Innsbruck International Film Festival, 2025, Austria
Beldocs Int. Documentary Film Festival, 2025, Serbia

∣ Screening Tour in Albania 2025 ∣
The Albanian Cinematheque - Vila 31 x Art Explora, 2025, Albania
Pallati Kultures Vlorë, Albania
Kinema Gjirokastër, Albania
Kinema Republika Shkodër, Albania
AQSHF Albanian National Film Archive Tirana, Albania

Supported by the Austrian Embassy in Tirana

∣ Cinema Tour in Austria 2025 ∣
Metro Kinokulturhaus Wien, Austria
Das Kino – Salzburg Filmkulturzentrum, Austria
Kiz Royakino Graz, Austria

Camillo De Marco for Cineuropa, 2025
“Let’s sing a lullaby, not to send this gigantic iron and cement-built baby to sleep. Let’s sing a lullaby so that it grows stronger, so that revolution can march incessantly through its veins”. These verses from a nursery rhyme dating back to the Soviet period in Albania and carrying some kind of message, reappear throughout Austrian director Johannes Gierlinger’s documentary, Generations of Images (...).
The voiceover (his?) which comments on self-aggrandising footage from the communist period – the monuments erected by an elite group from the past, crowds applauding Supreme Leader Enver Hoxha – uses suggestive turns of phrase to ask how much of an effect this footage could still have on society today and to what extent these notions are interwoven and perceptible in that country today. “This is where we can start looking back on dramas by observing the order of things; the past explains itself in the light of recently discovered footage...” Or rather: “Constellations from different eras are like star formations and they behave differently according to their location in the sky. How eagerly one dreams of the next era”. Gierlinger stops the footage at certain points, points out faces and specific details, and frames them using a typical filmmaker gesture: positioning the thumbs and index fingers of both hands to form a rectangle.

Philipp Stadelmaier for Diagonale Graz, 2025
Material from film archives and contemporary footage (on 16mm) are interwoven to a dense essay on the history of Albania, from the times of the communist Hoxha dictatorship to the present. Focus is on the interpretation of an old, supposedly regime-critical poem by young Albanians. While the films’ images are a living, historical substance that can be shaped and distorted, the poetry is a ray of light traversing them, illuminating their meaning in constantly new and different ways.

Martin Fichter-Wöß for Austria Presse Agentur, 2025
An indirect dialogue between the generations emerges in poetic form, which only seems to take place to a limited extent in the country itself. There are actually no generations of images to be seen in Gierlinger's film, everything merges into one another, remains separate in itself, but results in an overall picture from a bird's eye view, like pieces of a mosaic. The flow of time is revealed in the image, whereby its ambiguities are unveiled when Gierlinger discovers the micro-moments before the staged applause of the masses in the archive, which reveal far more in the frustrated, dismissive faces than the subsequent storms of jubilation.

Michael Omasta, Falter, 2025
An astonishing film essay that traces the profound transformation processes of Albanian history. The specially recorded conversations with former dissidents and young people reveal different views of ruptures and continuities between the communist past and the capitalist present, between dictatorship and democracy. However, the film owes its extraordinary fascination not least to the fact that Johannes Gierlinger was able to view Enver Hoxha's film archive in order to get to the bottom of the regime's images and image regimes - and, despite all the personality cult, to identify rare moments of hesitation, ambivalence and possibly resistance. 

Mattia Gritti for Quinlan.it - Rivista di critica cinematografica, 2025
Based on the personal archive of Enver Hoxha, Johannes Gierlinger composes a film essay that immerses itself in the Albanian context, but does not fail to broaden the view. Amidst anagraphic and aesthetic differences, the filmmakers generations of images measures the weight of power and poetry and actualises an illustrious tradition. (...) Generations of Images is a film essay that has the ambition to immerse itself in the world (or rather, to seize its own volatility) and that cannot help but question its own pacing, (...). Obscure and unsettling, as the musical commentary emphasises, is the path the camera phantasmagorically takes in the final sequence, almost imitating Antonioni's The Passenger (profession: reporter) and calculating the crossing of the window, here a striking frame.

Marina Pavido for Cinema Austriaco, 2025
As the director himself states, the images show us people, bodies, faces, but we can barely guess what these people are thinking and feeling. Perhaps only a still image (which is also framed by two hands) could tell us something more. Or maybe not? And so this interesting generation of images aims above all to give us interesting thought-provoking ideas about historical moments that were of decisive importance in Albania's recent history, leaving us free to interpret them, thanks also to the numerous testimonies of those who experienced these moments first-hand.

Marko Stojiljković for Ubiquarian, 2025
Gierlinger approaches the topic as an essayist, digging through the public and private archives, commenting on the things he found and letting others do the same thing to open a dialogue between the two times, both brutal in their own ways. In the archival footage, we can see the parades thrown for Hoxha, where seemingly exalted people try to feel and memorise every word he speaks. (...) To open the dialogue between the past and the present, Gierlinger also films some new material. Some of the elderly people express their nostalgia for the bygone times, while others who were the victims of repression highlight its bad sides. On the other hand, young people talk about the challenges of the present and the capitalism that comes from abroad to exploit the domestic workforce and conquer the market. The paradox is that it happens on the call of the prime minister, who is the leader of the Socialist Party. However, the film moves away from strictly a historical and political examination because of a test the filmmaker invents for some of his younger subjects. Namely, they had to read and analyse a poem written during the communist regime and to understand it, they used both their own instincts and their parents’ stories.

Marco Zonca for Bergamo News Review,
A lullaby that insinuates doubt, between the desire for revolution or the continuation of the regime. Among the most interesting material are the images taken from archive material of dictator Enver Hoxha's private life, with films that take on red tones, an unintentionally symptomatic change of tone of the political climate of the time. Images of the regime (some of them terribly evocative) are accompanied by interviews of young people, the first generation not to have known communism, looking to the future. The contradictions remain, along with the call for continued vigilance. The statues of the protagonists of History have always crumbled and will always crumble: a watchful and attentive eye is needed to understand the opportunities and dramas hidden behind every face of Power.

IFFI - Innsbruck International Film Festival,
The title of this film has a reverse meaning, too: Images of Generations. It shows and tells the story of many decades of Albanian history, from the communist dictatorship under Enver Hoxha and the civil war of 1997 to the political resignation and fighting spirit of today. Archive footage is juxtaposed with contemporary, analogue observations. A group of young people, mostly female, reflect on the trauma and future of the country, taking an old poem as their starting point whose title and meaning can also be twisted and turned: ‘Moment of Action’. 

Martina Genetti, Curator
From a perspective always situated in the present and directed towards the past, GENERATIONS OF IMAGES finds its own language to examine regime images and image regimes. It is the language of poetry, that rejects the logic and linearity of conventional historiography, allows for contradictions, and expresses itself both in thoughts and in actions. It enables not only the observation of images but also allows images to speak for themselves, to find new meanings, and create underlying narratives. Thus, generations of images form a multilayered and polyphonic historical image, that doesn’t speak of the past as much as it speaks about an ambivalent relationship to it, showing how deeply the traces of history are inscribed into the fabric of the present.