“Open-Hearted Doorman” is a touching animation based on a New York Times article by Julie Margaret Hogben that tells the story of the love between a kindhearted doorman named Guzim and the young woman after whom he looked for years, supporting her through bad dates and an unexpected pregnancy with love and dignity, despite the hardship he endured before he came to the United States from Albania.
He was kind and well mannered, a gray-haired cross between Cary Grant and George Clooney. Born in Albania in the mid-1940s, he hailed from an educated military family; his father had been an army general. When Guzim was 19, the communist leader Enver Hoxha’s secret police arrested and interned his family, accusing them of treason. …At 39, he was finally released, and the United States granted his family asylum. He found a job as a white-glove doorman in New York. Whenever I asked him how he was, on any day, at any hour, he always said, “No complaints.”
