Valbona

After winning a scholarship to the most prestigious private university in Albania, Valbona moves from her rural mountain village to Tirana, the sprawling capital – and her parents move with her. She finds a city full of stark contrasts, where wealth and poverty and modernity and traditionalism live side-by-side, and where the country’s painful past still influences the present, no matter how much some may try to gloss over it. As she integrates herself into the bustling social scene of Tirana’s youthful elite, she struggles to see beyond the complex facades that so many of the people around her seem to have constructed. The more she tries to live her life the way she wants to, the more difficult it becomes for her to find a balance between the careless decadence of her new friends and the suffocating conservatism of her parents.