Lea Ypi

When Lea Ypi stumbles upon a 1941 honeymoon photograph of her glamorous grandmother in the Alps, she embarks on a quest to reconstruct the woman’s life. Using archive files and spy reports, Ypi uncovers the fascinating and disturbing story of her grandmother’s life from Ottoman-era Salonica to wartime Albania and the rise of communism. It’s a life embroiled in politics, class, love, exile and surveillance. Ypi grapples with unsettling questions about her own family’s past, what it means to survive in an age of extremes, and whether we have the moral authority to judge the acts of previous generations.