The Planting of Trees

Synopsis
A young boy, Lindi, a final-year student, is arrested on charges of propaganda of decadent literature and failure to report attempted escape.
Lindi lives alone with his mother, a primary school teacher, who, after the arrest of her son, takes the bed.
In the investigation, Lindi admits to reading the banned book, without telling who gave it to him (“I found it on a desk …”), and for the accusation of attempted escape, he does not accept it, as among other things “how can he?” to abandon the mother he loves so much. ”
His name had come from two friends of the faculty, who had wanted to cross the border, inviting Lindi to escape. When they were caught at the border, they told the investigator that they had also proposed to Lind to escape. He had refused to escape, but he was accused of not reporting. Lindi was sentenced to seven years in prison. As a result, his mother was fired from her job as a primary school teacher. She finds work in a carpet factory, where she tries to keep up, the next day when she will take the long road to bring her son’s food to prison. But there in the cell, Lindi does not need much food, because due to the psychic and spiritual shock he suffered, as well as the disgusting smell that comes to the cell, he begins to vomit incessantly, even when he does not eat, although the mother tries to bring those kinds of foods that do not provoke vomiting.
Lindi is in the cell with three other inmates: an accountant, greedy talkers, a highlander who had beaten the village party secretary after harassing his granddaughter; As well as an ordinary criminal. Faced with the prison regime, they welcome Lind’s arrival in the cell, also because Lindi offered him his prison food share, as well as the food his mother sends him.
Lindi continues to vomit, while the highlander next to him tries to convince him that the aversion to food passes in time and that when he will get used to it, he will realize that the air we breathe out of the cell or during a one-hour walk in the prison yard is something he can’t belong to this world.
Lind’s health deteriorates and he becomes reflexively distracted and groans and the little fluids that remain in his stomach bother the co-sufferers all night as they sleep soundly from the cold.
In the first weeks, Lindi receives a letter from his girlfriend, but in time they also become rarer, until they are stopped altogether, and as a result, his condition becomes worse.
The white-hearted highlander thinks of writing a love letter as if it came from his girlfriend. Secretly, he gives the letter in an envelope to a generous guardian, who the next day hands it to Lindi. Lindi understands that the letter is not from his girlfriend but from the highlander, as the writing was betrayed him here and it’s with a dialect and continues with his anorexia.
Lindi dies in a midnight winter, unable to get used to the disgusting smell of the cell. After the first confusion, the friends of the cell realize that together with him they would lose his food share.
Disappointed with the loss of his food share, the ordinary prisoner proposes that they at least keep the corpse in the cell for two or three days, “until they catch Lind’s last bag of food from his mother’s. So it is better for the mother to find out later about the death of her son than for to find out he died.”
“Even better for you who had a friend,” they comfort the highlander, stunned by Lind’s death. With the help of the accountant, they put the corpse with eyes open against the wall and a cigarette in his mouth.
The guard doesn’t notice anything when he brings food that day. At night, prison inmates have difficulty sleeping.
The next day, accidentally seeing a cigarette in Lindi’s mouth, the guard on duty recalls that Lind doesn’t smoke, reviling the fraud and the prisoners are sentenced to one day without food “for lack of sincerity.”
The suspicion that Lindi going out to see his mother makes her insist on her son’s fate. The guards hide the truth from her, after her insistence. One day they tell her the truth.
Madly, the woman searches for her son’s grave, but the prison authorities do not provide information on the location of the anonymous burial pits. They orient the woman to look on a large wasteland in the back of the prison, where they usually bury or shoot dead convicts from illness or tortures.
The woman starts digging the wasteland with circumstantial means without knowing exactly where. She spends the night in a small city hotel to resume digging the next day. Weakened, she continues the next day, digging and digging holes with her hands which are full of wounds until the third day, when they look at her from the watchtower of observation, with her hair glued behind her forehead by sweat and dust, the guard soldier tells the chief guard to go to tower where he expresses his concern that the woman might and would die there digging and that they would then have to deal with her corpse as well.
Always, without remembering the exact place of the burial, the chief guard is of the opinion that the woman should continue with some digging of holes, “because then we will have it easier to plant seedlings or trees in those holes. Every time we were criticized for leaving that land barren.
P. S. The story is based on a true event.
Director: Fabio Seferi
Writer: Ylljet Alicka
Producer: Mateo Cingu
Key Cast
Luiza Xhuvani “Lindi’s Mother”
Roerd Toce “Lindi”
Gulielm Radoja “Marku”
Alert Celoaliaj “Chief Warder”
Kastriot Çaushi “Investigator”
Edvin Mustafa “Prisoner”
Myzafer Zifla “Prisoner”
Xhino Musollari “Guard Outside”
Erjon Hodo “Guard Inside”
Kevin Rrapaj “Guard Outside”
Kristina Rushiti “Girlfriend”
Festival Status: Winner, Best Short Film.