SHAME AND MONEY

“During the shooting of Exile, my previous feature, I took a photograph of Flonia and Astrit standing next to each other, looking directly into the camera. Months later, when I looked at the photo again, it reminded me of my parents in an unexpected way and I was strangely moved by it.I began to spin a story around the image: an alternative version of my parents’ lives, starting in the house where I grew up. The only difference was that it did not take place thirty years ago, but in the present day, in a post-war country that has been struggling for the past twenty years to find its footing inside an ultra-capitalist bubble. It was never intended to be a confrontation between child and parents, but rather the story of two random people who are fortunate enough to love each other, living in a specific country at a specific time—and who happen to be my parents.I went to Kosovo for research. I explored the housing and job markets and spoke to people who were searching for both. Alongside the existential hardship driving these people, there was another force just as present: shame. Shame in the eyes of others, and shame in their own.“Even your own mother doesn’t love you if you are broke,” said a man who stands on the same street every day, offering his services as a day laborer. He sounded deeply embarrassed when he said it, as if the sentence had slipped out unintentionally. The image of the mother is iconic in Kosovo. If there is one certainty in life, it is a mother’s love. In Albanian, the phrase sounds harsher and more direct, describing someone who has just realized that even a mother’s love has a price. This sentence set the tone for me. Even years later, there is nothing I associate more strongly with the film than this phrase. For me, Kosovo is both a glimpse into the past and a glimpse into the future. A country ravaged by war and a decade of Milosevic, it is undergoing development on many levels; new structures are being built. Some of these processes are known in the West only from history books about industrialization. At the same time, much of what is happening feels like a harbinger of a future slowly approaching the West itself—one only has to look at the housing market or the distribution of wealth in recent years. The withdrawal of a mother’s love, if it has not already happened, threatens us everywhere. When it came to production, it was important to capture reality as accurately as possible. Not to embellish anything, neither through the camera, nor through set design or any other means. The goal was to get as close as possible to a sense of reality; in other words, to create a record of the time. At the same time, consider the question of what it means to assert oneself every single day: what this does to a person, and to one’s self-image. Preserve dignity—yes. But how, if I have nothing to eat? I believe it is impossible to sustain a relatively healthy self—whatever that self may be—if I am constantly forced to prove my worth to others and, even worse, to myself. If I have to demonstrate again and again that I am capable, that I deserve to belong, that I am something, that I can do something. This inevitably leads to exhaustion and depression. That is what I believe is happening to Shaban: silently, with eyes wide open, he deteriorates until there is nothing left of him.”