 Nik
Xhelilaj was born in Tirana, on 5 March 1983, in a
family originally from south Albania, his father
was born in Vlore and his mother was born in
Tepelena. Both of his parents are high military
officers by profession. Thus, at the age of 14,
also thanks to his father's interest, he went to
Istanbul to follow the military high-school. But
his new path did not last more than 7 months and
he decided to give up on the pursue of the
military career and come back to Albania.
Eventually he engaged with other young artist into
the "Sirea Film" projects, with movie directors
Leonard Bombaj and Alfred Trebicka, who advised
him to compete and sign up for the Fine Arts
Academy. Firstly Nik was a candidate for the
Faculty of Law, where he did not win.
Then, in 2004, at the age of 21, he entered the
Fine Arts Academy for acting. In 2005, after just
having finished his freshman year, Nik was chosen
by the experienced movie director Pirro Milkani to
play the leading role of Lekė Seriani in the film
The Sadness of Mrs. Snajdrova (Albanian: Trishtimi
i zonjės Shnajder), which had strong
autobiographical elements. The plot itself dealt
in general with the life of director Milkani in
the 60, during his studies in
then-Czechoslovakia.[4] Even though he didn't know
the Czech language at all, the young actor
memorized and learned to pronounce his Czech lines
for the entire film. Nik appeared nude in shower
scene in this film. Also it was here that he
became widely known with his stage name or
nickname Nik, since the producers of the film
found it hard to pronounce the Albanian name
Kreshnik and thus suggested a shorter version of
it.[3] The movie was released in 2008 and was the
Albanian submission of the Academy Award for Best
Foreign Language Film for that year, but failed to
be nominated.
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