Time is running out. The last survivors of Kampi Tepelenë, Albania’s most notorious internment camp for women and children, are now in their eighties and nineties. Their memories — the cries of hunger in the barracks, the sound of the river swallowing the dead, the silence imposed by fear — exist almost entirely in living testimony. When these witnesses pass, so will the final living link to one of Europe’s least-known human tragedies.

For decades, Albania buried its past under the promise of progress. After the fall of the dictatorship, no truth commission was established, no museum built. Archives remain closed, the sites of suffering unmarked. A generation has grown up in the absence of truth — a silence that breeds denial, revisionism, and forgetting.

The Silent Country is being made in the last possible moment when this history can still be told by those who lived it. Survivors such as Simon Mirakaj, Mine Peza, and others carry within them the country’s unwritten record. Their voices tremble not only from age but from the weight of decades spent waiting to be heard.

Capturing these testimonies now is not simply an act of preservation — it is an act of national memory. Within a few short years, these witnesses will be gone, and Albania will face a future without living remembrance of its camps. To lose them is to lose the moral compass that can still guide the nation toward truth and reconciliation.

This film stands at that intersection of urgency and responsibility. By recording these final voices and placing them within the context of contemporary Albania — a country eager to project a modern image while its scars remain unacknowledged — The Silent Country ensures that the story of Tepelenë will not vanish with those who suffered there.ative project to share with the world. Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference.

Don’t worry about sounding professional. Sound like you. There are over 1.5 billion websites out there, but your story is what’s going to separate this one from the rest. If you read the words back and don’t hear your own voice in your head, that’s a good sign you still have more work to do.