Kosovan filmmaker Visar Morina won the Best Director Award at KVIFF in 2015 for his debut Babai. This year, his latest film, Shame and Money, earned the Grand Jury Prize at the Sundance Film Festival. Morina nevertheless also presented the film in Karlovy Vary.
“I wanted to explore the theme of violence because so many things in our society function only because we are threatened with consequences if we fail to do something or do it the wrong way. I believe in the laws of physics: when you apply pressure or violence to people, there is always a reaction. People can endure only a certain amount of injustice,” said the director, explaining why he had decided to tell the story of a man from the countryside who is unable to make a life for himself in the city. “We live in a strange time that tells us if we fail at something, we have failed as human beings altogether, and nothing can save us,” he continued.
When an audience member admitted during the discussion that she could not decide whether to root for the film’s protagonist, Morina asked what made her feel that way. “To me, the character is a real person. His sense of dignity plays a huge role in the way he behaves. Dignity and authenticity were things the cinematographer and I discussed extensively. We had specialists on set for every scene to make sure everything felt real, including the nursing sequences,” the director noted.
Just as at Sundance, where he said everyone asked about it, Morina was also questioned in Karlovy Vary about whether there really is a statue of Bill Clinton in Kosovo’s capital, Pristina. “Yes, and just a short distance from it, day labourers really do wait for work. I had it in the script from the very beginning,” he revealed. The audience also learned that a cow costs around €1,200 and that the director grew up in a rural environment much like that of his protagonist. “We wanted to shoot in the house where I grew up, but it was in such poor condition that it wasn’t possible,” the Kosovan filmmaker said with regret.
