A mere thirty miles from this future fantasyland is the capital city where Martä Gjatä lives. Hers is a country often confused with toy principalities like Andorra and Monaco, but in fact is a complex ensemble of mountains and streambeds and rich deposits of iron and chromium and annual rainfall statistics going back to the year 1910. There are also some Roman ruins and a number of mosques, now turned into museums, and the busy capital city (pop. 200,000) where Martä and her mother and her mother’s brother Miço live. (A fourth member of the household is old Zana, a family servant before Liberation, now lingering on as an honorary aunt and in winter sharing her bed with Uncle Miço, an Ethnoggraphi Emerti at the National University.) The apartment is small. The cooking facilities are rudimentary and the food somewhat monotonous, but Martä, aged forty-two, prides herself on creating a style to suit her confining circumstances. She makes a delicious mjarzadjpër, which is a mixture of cabbage, cheese and onions spiced with pepper. And the green checked dress she wears today is one she made herself.

She is a worker in the state film industry which last year produced fourteen feature films and more than twenty documentaries. She is also one of the few women to have been promoted to Direktor. This was three years ago. Before that time she was a celebrated film actress. The Scent of Flowers and Glorious Struggle are her most beloved films and the ones that have made her famous in her country. In the first of these she played the daughter of a patriot. She wore a kerchief and an embroidered apron (borrowed from Zana, since there was no such thing as a wardrobe department in the early days) and served glasses of raki to filthy, wounded soldiers, falling passionately in love with one of them, a mere boy whose legs had been crudely amputated after battle. (In real life this young man, Dimitro Puro, had been run over by a tractor.) The film closes with a village wedding scene (Dimitro and Martä) that is exuberantly folkloric but sadly muted by the spotty black and white film then in use, color film having been forbidden before the cultural revolution of 1979.