Aura is an aging Albanian woman living with her husband, while their daughter studies abroad. Her world is held together by routines, suspicions, and one object she trusts more than anything: her couch.
When it is sold behind her back, Aura treats it as a rupture in reality itself and sets out to fix it. The couch now sits with an old Roma man who has chosen it as the place to die and refuses to move.
None of them is willing to let it go. Aura’s husband arrives, a chainsaw appears, and the couch is split in two. Buried money spills out, mostly worthless. Things spiral quickly out of control.
Enxhi Rista was born in Albania. She studied Film and TV Directing at UNATC in Bucharest; then she followed the master’s degree in Film Production, and in 2023 she completed her PHD thesis called “Poetics and aesthetics in Albanian and Balkan cinematography”.
Short films directed by her: “He loves my eyes” awarded with Gopo Award for Best Short Documentary in 2020 in Romania, “Padre”, “Capoeira”, “Dry water”, “Realscope”.
The Couch is about our attachment to the past and the illusion of safety it promises. At its center is Aura, but the film unfolds as an ensemble, where her daughter, her husband, a conspiracy theorist, an uneasy historical past, and the local Roma community all carry equal weight in shaping the film world and its conflicting perspectives.
Through this structure, the film looks at personal, generational and community dynamics and the ways fear and events we didn’t choose shape how we move through the present. Aura channels her anxieties and desires into the couch, an ordinary object that becomes both a source of comfort and an emotional trap.
Absurdity sits at the core of the film, entangled with a dark humor that grows out of paranoia and a constant sense of threat. Conspiracy thinking becomes a filter through which reality shifts, pushing characters further apart and intensifying their conflicts.
The camera stays close to the tension between the characters, allowing the absurd to build gradually within a recognizable reality. The tone moves along the edge between dark comedy and drama, where the familiar begins to feel slightly off without losing its sense of truth.
The Couch is about how far we’re willing to go to hold things together, and what happens when we finally stop being afraid to let go.
