From 1945 to 1991, Albania was the biggest prison in Europe. For forty-five years, during the regime of Enver Hoxha – one of the fiercest in contemporary European history – thinking freely and expressing one’s own opinion in public was irresponsible and dangerous, even to the listeners. Daily life followed the rules imposed by a comprehensive and efficient surveillance system that insinuated itself into every facet of the public and private lives. Every day hundreds of agents monitored the ‘ideological correctness’ of party members and other citizens alike , spying on them and then classifying each individual based on their most insignificant mannerisms and behaviors. The collapse of the regime, symbolized by the demolition of Hoxha's statue in Skanderbeg Square on February 20, 1991, confronted Albanians with the freedom they had longed for decades, but also left them with a gaping void. "Europe's youngest country" - so defined by the MEPs present in Tirana during the days of the revolution - was faced with the sudden urgency of stripping its political, economic and social identity of the past’s stereotypes in order to move towards a future full of contradictions: migration, capitalism and consumerism, Europe. The Great Father is a long-term project that, using the particular Albanian case, reflects on the relationship between individuals and power throughout the world. The research process, started in 2018 and carried out in collaboration with the journalist Christian Elia, offers an immersion into today’s Albania in order to explore the implications and consequences of the rise and fall of a regime. The narrative corpus (photography and text) highlights the scars that this transition process has left in the society carefully analyzing its architecture and places, identifying gestures and symbols, digging through the rubble of the past and comparing it with that which populates the present time.