Blerta Basholli’s quiet and forceful drama about the awfulness of war and its effect on women in patriarchal small-town society is a welcome companion-piece to Strong Female Lead (2021) where we saw how hard it was to maintain respect and autonomy, even when you are the elected leader of a country.
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Director Visar Morina perfectly captures the uneasy dislocation of being a foreigner in a structured and comfortable society, using every frame to push us into a growing paranoia.
Continue readingSworn Virgin is another of those multinational coproductions but I’m going to call it an Albanian film. The thread of the story is about gender roles in rural Albania, and although it is set equally in Italy, it is Albanian life and culture that we experience. The story is set in two time periods, we see Mark traveling from Albania to Italy and reuniting with his sister and her family after 14 years. We can tell that Mark is actually a woman and we know that Lila, his sister, knows but everyone else is oblivious. We then flash back to Lila and Mark’s teenage years in Albania and we discover the story. Continue reading
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