Film Fact: Albania

To celebrate the weird and wonderful Eurovision Song Contest, we present weird and wonderful film facts about this year's finalist countries.

Albania's first feature film was Tana, a socially progressive film about a forthright young woman's attempt to overcome her Albanian family's prejudices and find true love. Speaking of prejudice, it featured as an odd plot point in a film based on a novel by Nobel prize-winning author Mario Vargas Llosa, Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter. Directed by Jon Amiel, who would go on to do wonders for Catherine Zeta-Jones in Entrapment, it's set in the 1950s and begins with a moribund radio serial receiving a new writer, Pedro Carmichael (a mercurial Peter Falk) who spices up the content and begins inserting anti-Albanian dialogue into the soap opera plots. The film is nominally about the illicit affair between a very young Keanu Reeves and Barbara Hershey as an older friend of his family, but the unexplained animosity towards Albanians soon has the expatriate community protesting outside the studio … It is one strange film.