Albanian Stories, 1997, video, 15 min

. Adrian Paci belongs to a group of Albanian artists who entered the art scene in the early 1990s and were called by Edi Muka the generation of "transition", echoing the radical social and political changes of that time. Like his colleagues, Paci as well was marked by his "traditional" academic education, so that until recently he had been developing his artistic language through the medium of painting. His first attempt in the new media was the video recording which he presents at Manifesta 3. It is a thematic presentation of the landmark year of 1997 when the unfortunate political circumstances swept Albania into civil war and later into a state of total chaos and anarchy. Paci deals with the scarred souls of the so-called "boat people" who had to flee in panic the terrors of war as their homeland collapsed. The subtle mood of the film was achieved with minimal intervention by the artist. He simply recorded his daughter's testimonials in three sessions and framed them in an artistic context. Paci himself described the work as a kind of readymade film where we witness a child - his daughter Jola - playing spontaneously, conveying all the traumatic experiences of the ravages of war that marked the little girl for life. The artist succeeded not only with the simple, honest, deliberately simple approach to recording a powerful, emotionally devastating story, but also placed himself in a critical position towards the manipulative power of the local as well as international media and their methods