Sundance Grand Jury Prize winner Visar Morina returns to the Sarajevo Film Festival — the scene of a previous triumph — with the biting social drama “Shame and Money,” which won the top prize in Park City earlier this year and is playing in the festival’s main competition.
The director’s third feature wowed audiences at Sundance, where Variety’s chief film critic Guy Lodge praised the “stoic, slowly lacerating look at economic desperation and exploitation in contemporary Europe” as a “keenly observed, sharp-edged portrait of a Kosovo family divided by class.”
Morina’s previous film, “Exile,” which also premiered in Park City, won the Sarajevo Film Festival in 2020. That film, about a Kosovan immigrant grappling with paranoia after a string of menacing events, was loosely inspired by the director’s own experience. Born in Kosovo, Morina emigrated with his family to Germany in the 1990s, before the war that would ultimately lead to the country’s independence.
“Shame and Money” follows Shaban (Astrit Kabashi) and Hatixhe (Flonja Kodheli), a couple in their forties living with their extended family in rural Kosovo, where they eke out a modest living on their farm. When a family dispute leads to a terrible act of betrayal, their livelihood is suddenly lost.
Along with Shaban’s mother and the couple’s young daughters, they are forced to move to Pristina, where the pressure to provide weighs heavily on both husband and wife. Piecing together odd jobs, they do their best to find a way in the hyper-capitalist Kosovan capital, until the relentless struggle of daily life pushes Shaban to the breaking point.
Though deeply rooted in the sociopolitical realities of Kosovo, a country that’s largely failed to make good on the promises of the post-war order, Morina sees “Shame and Money” as a parable of modern-day Europe. Across the continent, he notes, the rising cost of living, housing shortages, stagnant wages and a growing rift between the haves and have-nots has spurred widespread pessimism about the direction in which society seems to be heading.
“We are actually coming to a point in Germany where it feels like we are going straight to a situation like this in Kosovo,” Morina says. “It’s a look into the past and a warning to the future.”
The film provides a bleak portrait of Kosovo, a war-scarred country whose social fabric is fraying at the seams: a society where, as Shaban is reminded by his brother-in-law, Alban (Alban Ukaj), a nouveau riche businessman who reluctantly agrees to take in the struggling family, “Everything has its place. And every person, too.”
For the husband and wife duo, that means a succession of low-skilled, low-wage jobs as they scrap to make ends meet. The rigid taxonomy of contemporary urban life couldn’t be more apparent: When Shaban is offered a job as a night watchman at a gated community rising on the city’s outskirts, he explains to Hatixhe that it is a job “to keep out poor people like us.”
Gradually, Shaban becomes a ghost of himself, in what comes to feel like a natural outcome in a society where a man’s value can be calculated down to the very last cent. “‘When you’re broke, even your mom doesn’t love you,’” Morina recalls a Kosovan man once telling him. “There is nothing I associate more strongly with the film than this phrase.”
“Shame and Money” is written by Morina and Doruntina Basha. It’s produced by Vicky Bane and Schuldenberg Films in co-production with Eagle Eye Films, Vertigo Ljubljana, On Film Production, List Production and Quetzalcoatl. World sales are being handled by The Yellow Affair and Espoo.
In both of his most recent features, Morina has been preoccupied with the lives of outsiders — those who, either because of immigration (“Exile”) or class status (“Shame and Money”), are shunted to the periphery of society. Increasingly, it seems those dividing lines have become chasms.
At a time when the world (briefly) christened its first trillionaire and the ruling classes build underground bunkers or dream of blasting off into outer space, “Shame and Money” provides a stark warning about the direction in which things are trending — both for our societies and ourselves.
“I really believe that people can only take shit to a certain extent. At some point, they go crazy,” says Morina. “There is this German word sozialer Frieden — social harmony. And I think at some point, there is a point of no return.”
The Sarajevo Film Festival runs Aug. 14 – 21.
