Giegi Xhuvani (France/Albania)
Set in Albania in the late seventies, this sharply observed film puts the downside of living under ideological socialism in sharp perspective: Petty bureaucrats, special deals, pointless work and stupid cruelty become the norm, all in the name of the better good. The milieu is a village school, where a young biology teacher, Andre (Artur Gorishti), has come to join the staff and is immediately secunded into the teacher's main activity: Helping their classes place letters, made by whitewashed stones hammered into the ground that spell out messages along the roadside. He is given his pick between two phrases: "Hail the Revolutionary Spirit" and "American Imperialism Is a Paper Tiger." He picks one and instantly earns the enmity of the French teacher because, his class explains, he picked the best slogan: the one that required the fewest rocks. Collective enterprise, he discovers, often is simply a form of scapegoating, where those who are too honest, or too dumb, to play the game properly, are punished. - L.L.

(Tues. Sept. 11, 7 p.m., Cumberland; Fri. Sept. 14, 7 p.m., Uptown)