“It was summer, in the middle of August, I was thirteen years old, in Albania.
“This film is not for you!” my father said, chasing me out of the small living room where we had the television and closing the door. But I, in the half-light of the corridor, bent down, gluing my eye to the lock of that closed door. The television was right in front of it: from Valona one could only get the first channel of the Italian RAI, which was forbidden by the regime of the time. And that was how Federico Fellini’s Amarcord came into my life. I only saw the images, the music came in muffled and so did the words, which I would still not have been able to understand, but I was thunderstruck. Those simple, human, genuine and sincere stories: the family, grandfather, relatives, friends, the small community, the ancient village by the sea narrated in all seasons, the summer heat in the middle of the countryside, the announcement of spring with the wind whirling ‘the little hands’, the autumn that brings the first melancholies, the amazement and joy of the falling snow: those stories were identical to mine.
Never could I have imagined that, among so many cities, when I grew up I would live in Rimini, the city of Fellini, the ‘borgo’ of his Amarcord. And residing in Rimini, and becoming an Italian citizen, Amarcord has accompanied my entire life, because it also tells my ‘amarcord’, the indelible memory of the Vlore of my childhood and very early youth, a city like Rimini, lying on the soft and gentle shores of a luminous sea. Which is the same sea for both of us, that Adriatic that unites, fraternises and makes me happy, because it seems to me that I have never left home. ” Agim Sulaj