April 2024. A well-known Albanian writer arrives in Sarajevo for a one-month literary residency. By the next day, he realizes he has no real idea what to write about, despite the promising project he outlined in his residency application. At the same time, a photograph weighs heavily in his pocket—an old black- and-white portrait of four children taken at the most prestigious photography studio in his hometown, Shkodër. His father once told him these were his cousins, who had left Albania for Sarajevo during the aftermath of the First World War, sometime around 1918. Their names, and the shared surname Cukali, are handwritten on the back.
