AFTER THE CURTAIN

Ballet has been part of my life since childhood. My older cousin danced ballet, and for years I regularly went to watch her perform. At that age, I experienced ballet primarily through the emotions it created in me: the music, the movement, the concentration, and the strange transformation of a human body into something almost unreal on stage. Years later, that feeling has remained with me. But now, as a filmmaker, I find myself interested in what exists behind that transformation.

What happens before the curtain rises? And more importantly, what happens after it falls? I want to make After the Curtain because I am interested in the people behind the performance rather than the performance itself. Ballet requires years of training, discipline and sacrifice, yet the audience ultimately sees only a few minutes of the result. Behind those minutes are people building their identities, relationships and futures around a profession that demands almost total commitment. I want to understand what that commitment means when it becomes an everyday life.

The question feels particularly relevant in Albania today. For many young people, building a professional future increasingly involves looking beyond the country. Staying is a choice, leaving is a choice, and sometimes neither feels entirely like a choice. Ballet creates a particularly intense version of this dilemma because a dancer cannot simply separate their profession from their body, their time and their identity. Years of youth are invested in becoming a dancer, while the professional life itself is inherently limited. At some point, every dancer has to confront the question of what comes next.

That is where I see the film becoming larger than ballet.

I am interested in the tension between passion and practicality: how someone can deeply love what they do while still asking whether that profession can provide a sustainable life. How much can someone sacrifice for the work they believe in? What happens when the profession that has shaped you cannot guarantee the future you imagined? And what does it mean to remain in Albania and try to build that future here?

My focus will be on the dancers themselves. I don’t want to make a film that explains the institution or celebrates its achievements. The National Theatre of Opera and Ballet is the environment in which these lives unfold, but the people are the reason I want to enter that world. I want to observe them through the ordinary moments that are usually invisible: preparation, repetition, exhaustion, waiting, conversations, relationships, uncertainty, small victories and moments when the person exists independently of the performer.

I am also aware of what I could get wrong.

I do not want to romanticise sacrifice, reduce the dancers to victims, or turn their difficulties into a simple argument about Albania’s cultural system. I do not want to tell them what their lives mean before I have actually listened through observation. Most importantly, I do not want the beauty of ballet to become a distraction from the people themselves.

This is why the film will be entirely observational. I want to give the dancers enough space for contradictions to exist. A person can be passionate and frustrated, proud and uncertain, determined to stay and still dream of leaving. I am interested in those contradictions because they are where real lives become more complicated than a documentary’s argument.

In the end, I do not want the audience simply to understand what it is like to be a ballet dancer in Albania. I want them to feel the weight of the choice: to experience the beauty of the work, but also the time, uncertainty, sacrifice and emotional investment that exist behind it.

When the curtain falls, the performance is over. For the dancer, life continues. That is where I want this film to begin.