SHORTFILM | 18′ | COLOR+BLACK&WHITE | DCP | 2011

“It wear as it grows” is part of the “Albanian trilogy: A series of Devious Stratagems”

Logline

1959, at the height of the Cold War, Nikita Khrushchev visited Albania. Soviet plans to arm Enver Hoxha’s state with submarines and warships, positioning long and medium-range missiles along the Albanian coast, were devised to counter the US missile bases installed in Italy in order to control the Mediterranean. A large number of young Albaniansailors took part in military training under the Soviet army. In 1963, after the break in relations with the USSR, the Albanian navy, in paranoid fear of enemy attack, sighted an object that repeatedly appeared and vanished in the sea off the coast at Patok. Believing it to be a submarine, they fired. The object was in fact a cachalot {Physeter macrocephalus L.. ), the Mediterranean sperm whale. After being recovered, its remains were displayed in the Natural History Museum in Tirana, where it canstill be found.