Short Summary
MY HEART IS NO LONGER AN ORPHAN
a Yugoslav Love Story
She was seventeen and he twenty years old, when they met at a poetry read in a city in Macedonia, then part of country known as the jewel of the Balkans.
He was more of a poet than she was, always brooding and sad even when he was happy. She was a bubbly tomboy who liked his attention and was tickled by the nickname he gave her, Paola. Salvatore Adamo’s Paola Dulce Paola played on every radio station in Europe and the thought that he could compare her to the real princess amused her. He claimed his Paola was just as pretty and as personable as the real Paola Margherita Giuseppina Maria Antonia Consiglia.
They had three days together and he left the Festival convinced that he he had found his half. She was molded by the sun, he said, and she was the one. They promised to write until they meet again at another poetry read, in August.
For the next 3 months they wrote and made plans, and he would revisit those letters and the events of that distant 1969 now and then, as if to punish himself.
In the city of Struga where every August poets gather to read their dreams, he searches for Paola but cannot find her. Heartbroken, he is reluctant to leave but under pressure from his fellow travel companions, he abides. Paola arrives two hours later.
Over the course of the next 49 years he would create his own myth and wallow in the guilt of not having waited for her. Trapped into two marriages, both empty of any emotional connections, he would carry Paola’s absence in his heart and through the haunting imagery of his poetic verses. The handsome youth turns into a dark and a somber man who lives with Paola’s absence and a cry that emanates from his heart…. Why are you not here?
Young hearts wound easily and Paola would take his absence as a clear sign that he did not care. She locks away the memory of the promise he held and moves on. Shortly after Struga 69 she leaves her native land, curious to understand the word. Off first to Paris, she would eventually settle in New York City. She doesn’t just walk through live, she dives.
In 1984, she would arrive at the Sarajevo Airport, to work on covering the Winter Olympics the same day he would fly to yet another festival in Struga, the town in which they missed one another.
In 1991 he would be in Belgrade for the Annual Book Fair when she is there producing a film.
They would miss one another at the Nikola Tesla airport, when she leaves for the United States and he flies back to his hometown in Montenegro.
In the early 90s, Paola watches from afar as her native land dives into the abyss of hatred, but she fears for no one, he is absent from the hallways of her memories.
In the midst of the horror he writes his last poem: My Father’s rifle.
He would be reminded of her every time the name Paola comes up-- when the real princess’s husband, the Belgian King to be visits Yugoslavia for talks with Marshal Tito, when the Princess, now Sua Altessa Royale, vacations on the Adriatic Coast, when the scandal of her husband illegitimate daughter is strewn over the European yellow press, when Salvatore Adamo explains on an Italian talk show what inspired him to write Paola Dulce Paola.
An old man at 70, much too old for his age, he has turned to God for answers, and every Sunday he asks the same question - Why did I leave? Why didn’t I wait? Is it because I did not have faith in my own capacity to love? I did know she was the one, yet I bend under pressure to marry and raise a daughter that was not mine. Why?
Forty nine years later, on a crisp Sunday in May in 2018 , at the end of another Sunday church service, he muses, looking down at his smartphone…I could have found her, if these little gadgets existed then, he says. It was destiny, says a churchgoer he has befriended.
But destiny can be challenged.
In New York City, Paola enters her apartment and hears the familiar email jingle. She walks to the monitor. The message on the screen reads: Paola Dulce Paola, do you remember Prilep and 1969? I never forgot.
***
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And ode to a beautiful land
This iwllbe a two-weeks shoot which does not invoive special effects or very high end and costly produciotn scenees. Tsi sis an ancotrs' dirven film. The story is told thugh poetry, lonely walks of the poeple missing one another and poetry readings. .
The events take palce dugthe happyYugoslav time, whent he cutnry held thepormise of a great brightfutre ofr itspoeple and hwne people love s and hoped... The film willnto tellteh dark sotry of Yugslvia; so many films ahve benemade that only porote the hate among thepoele ; 1969 was a year fullfoporimse and hope and os tdid htelove sotry. Themtafor of hte film is in thta voth bend up tragically. but were tow happy moement sin the existnes ofhte tow lvers which trnascends the happineed of hte poeple in hte ocytrn that isolonger.![]()
