After Erion Velija’s last performance, those who suffered most emotionally from the attacks against Robert Ndrenika were more or less those who are suffering materially from the absence of the lax mayor. Avoiding the essence of that staging, which left a sour taste behind, a handful of Velija’s supporters tried to give him the appearance of a victim through the sensitivity that an elderly man, moreover a beloved character of cinema and theater, immediately put under the barrage of the network.
And this attempt is not that it did not achieve its goal. The director of the theatrical piece, “The Kiss on the Forehead,” was left aside and almost everyone was occupied with the one who has spent his whole life playing the roles assigned to him. Our popular tendency to punish the consequence and not the cause, shone once again in letters and screens. The fame of Ndrenika, precisely for this reason selected to “kiss that man,” attracted all the post-festival controversy. It is the same mentality that punishes the security collaborator more strongly and not the one who forces him to become such, that denigrates what is sold and venerates what is bought, that attacks what humbles and respects what hits him. In this popular complex of submission to power and hysteria over human weakness, Ndrenika was also hit, leaving aside the author of the ugly play.
In the challenge between power and intellectuals, of course, those who are misused, sold, or knowingly serve must also be pointed out for the harm they cause to society. But in this specific case, those who dealt with Ndrenika fell precisely into the trap designed to amnesty the one who had distributed the roles. Both those who revolted with the public act of the 83-year-old actor and those who pretended to feel sorry for him, ultimately avoided the essence of that theater in the courtroom.
Despite the caricatured forms of the staging, the debate that this event should have produced is that of the relationship between power and that part of society that is presumed to be in antagonism with it, as the vanguard of progress, of greater freedoms and of the most numerous rights. Those who defended Ndrenika did not say a word about the continuous deformation that Veliaj, with his power, has inflicted on artists, journalists, athletes, and creators in general, who precisely because of the corrupt system of values that the Erionveliaj clan has installed, do not manage to live with their work or grow old with dignity from the sweat of their brow. No other well-known names were mentioned who, due to their dependence on this rotten power, have been forced to distribute soup, plant trees. To make public statements against the opposition and to line up in Ajola Xoxa’s medemek cultural foundations.
Criticism after kissing Veliaj on the forehead, Robert Ndrenika: He didn’t buy me a house…
The public voices that were moved by the kiss on the forehead and revolted by the attacks on Ndrenika, never once did the simple calculation of how many creative people would live with dignity if instead of soup they shared the hundreds of thousands of euros that the first lady of the municipality had invested in her personal wardrobe. Or if the money distributed in envelopes in the service of propaganda were distributed with competition and transparency to support precisely the independence of artists against the pressure of power.
The play “Kiss on the Forehead” should not be analyzed for the human weakness of Ndrenika, but should be seen as a screaming metaphor for the capture that a corrupt government has made of what should be the most progressive part of society. Not simply for the act of a well-known actor, but for the way this act was treated in the sphere of public debate. Just as in the case of the Veliaj file, where the crime is overlooked in order to personally capture a prosecutor, in this case too the director is amnestied in order to deal with an actor.
Source: lapsi.al
