A tale of resilience, grief, and survival as one woman defies tradition to rebuild her life in post-war Kosova.
"I really like to pick stories of survival...how people survive
no matter where they live... People create life...fall in love...eat...
Somehow life pushes us to continue and search for hope and survival even when there is no hope..."
-Blerta Basholli, writer and director of “Hive”
[From an interview with Stephanie Gardner on June 14, 2021 in Prishtinë, Kosova]
Sometimes a film has the ability to transport us to another time and space. Blerta Basholli’s 2021 triple-award-winning Sundance film, “Hive,” brings us to a small village in Kosova in 2006.
Kosova is a small, landlocked nation in Southeast Europe, formerly an autonomous region in ex-Yugoslavia. It is one of the newest independent states in the world, gaining its independence in 2008. From February 1998 through June 1999, Kosova was embroiled in a horrific war, fought between ethnic-Albanians seeking the freedom to live openly as Albanians in their Kosovan homeland, and ethnic-Serbs with the Yugoslav army, seeking to control the territory of Kosova and remain in the Serb-dominant Yugoslavia, which was in the process of breaking apart.
The Albanian-Kosova-made film “Hive” opens seven years after the war ends. “Hive” is based on the true story of real-life Fahrije Hoti, expertly played by Kosova-born-Albanian actress Yllka Gashi. Fahrije is an entrepreneurial-minded woman who starts selling homemade ajvar (a red-pepper condiment popular in the region) to support her family and help her community thrive in post-war Kosova.
“Hive,” takes us directly into Fahrije’s world in Krushë e Madhe, an old-stone, Albanian village in Kosova, which experienced one of the worst massacres of the war, leaving nearly all the town’s women widows. Seven years on, many of the men are still missing. Bodies have not been returned. And of those that have, many have not yet been identified.
Unlike many films from this former Yugoslavia region, Basholli is not directly making a war film. Only through brief radio and TV spots in the background do we hear bits and pieces about the war that this town is still recovering from.
Many international audiences may come in with little to no knowledge of this tragedy. This should not matter, as the film is not meant to be a diatribe of the war, rather, an intimate portrait of a family and village dealing with the day-to-day realities of the aftermath.
While you do not need to know the full history of the war, a basic knowledge of the genocides that happened throughout the region which left many Muslim families without husbands, sons, or fathers, can greatly elevate your emotional connection to the story.
“Hive” is set in a village that experienced one of the war’s many ethnic-cleansing massacres. The Krushë e Madhe massacre occurred on March 25, 1999, the day after NATO bombed Yugoslavia in an attempt to end the Serbian attacks on Kosova. Yugoslav forces entered the village, separated men from women, then killed 241 ethnic Albanian civilians, mostly men and adolescent boys, while countless women were abused and raped. Today, there are still missing bodies, and tensions remain high between Kosova and Serbia, a country that still does not recognize Kosova’s independence.
To me, “Hive” is a story of human grief.
No matter where a viewer is from, it is safe to say that most can identify with love, loss, and grief.
At the start of the film, we have been dropped into the middle of Fahrije’s life, who fearlessly jumps into the back of a truck filled with unidentified bodies and desperately searches for her husband. Like most of the men in the village that were killed in an act of ethnic cleansing, Fahrije’s husband never came back, nor has been found these seven years later.
Fahrije is on a quest to know what happened to her husband, to find and identify his body so that the family can move past their unlikely hope that he might walk in the door one day, somehow escaping the massacres. Not having a body to identify leaves the grief dangling in the air with no room for inner peace. Without this resolution, it is very difficult to move on. Fahrije knows she might never get catharsis yet she will try, as she also knows she needs to carry on, one way or another.
We know that these women and the community at large are grieving, and that they need to survive somehow to take their lives into the future; to give their children a chance to have a future.
Our shared human experiences can connect us across cultures. This is the power of cinema. Through this quest to emotionally process the blows life deals us, is how I personally connect with “Hive” and other films such as Aida Begić's “Snow” (2008), which tells a similar story of war-widows from Bosnia; or Lucrecia Martel’s “La Ciénaga” (2001), from Argentina, which makes you feel like a fly-on-the-wall of a dysfunctional family. These films concentrate on an emotional journey rather than spoon-feeding you plot points.
We get to know the characters of “Hive” through their various relationships with grief. Fahrije deals with her grief internally and through the actions she takes to put her life back on track, such as earning money to buy school books for her kids. Her teenage daughter grieves by believing that her father will return, rebelling against her mother as teenagers are prone to do, and holding on to the few keepsakes that remain from her father’s life.
Having been turned away from all other options, Fahrije manages to sell an old table saw belonging to her husband in order to have seed funds to start her ajvar business. Fahrije’s daughter sees this as her mother trying to erase his memory. Simultaneously, Fahrije’s father-in-law insists the table-saw not be sold, in part to appease his temperamental granddaughter, but also it is his own way of grieving; not giving up on his son who never came home. The father-in-law is elderly, wheelchair-bound, and not able to work to provide funds for the family, yet he maintains status as the patriarch leaving very few options for the family to bring in an income.
One nice aspect of this film is how delicately Basholli plays the relationship between Fahrije and her father-in-law. It would be easy to turn him into the antagonist representing all the other men of the village who scorn Fahrije for her actions that they deem unfit for a woman. While he disapproves of Fahrije’s actions as a woman-in-charge, there remains a tenderness between the two through their shared bond for their missing loved-one, and by the end, there is a subtle shift of his dominance to the situation.
It amazes me how calm Fahrije’s character is throughout the film despite many very frustrating obstacles that follow her everywhere. Fahrije does not say much within the film, her actions speak louder than words. Basholli directs these silent moments nicely, and it gives us time for reflection to soak in the emotions: a simple hand sweeps across dust in the dark old shed, for instance.
Fahrije is the only woman in her community to accept an offer to learn how to drive. Driving, she sees, as a means towards an income. A way to get to and from jobs in the city. A practical choice through the desire to survive, in a community where traditionally, women do not drive. It is not law, rather, a social custom that has become normalized over the years.
She faces abuse after abuse for this simple act and even more so when she sets out to start her own business. Fahrije is called a “whore” by neighbors; rocks are thrown at her; and other women who were previously friends, now disassociate themselves with her.
What makes this film so powerful is Fahrije’s almost silent defiance against the patriarchy of her village, which perhaps reflects the villagers’ fear of change. Fear to move on from the horrors they’ve been through. Perhaps progress means moving on, which means you’re “abandoning” those you lost. There is a conflict between the desire to remember and the necessity to move on. Fahrije has her own private resistance towards this fear. Through this constant resistance to what others think and do, she perseveres.
Though this feels nothing like a mainstream movie, it uses the classic Hollywood-storytelling model to give our heroine a mission (to run a community-based ajvar business) from which the character immediately faces obstacles. At first, almost no one supported Fahrije’s decision to drive and start her own business. Once she overcomes one obstacle, a bigger obstacle takes its place, such as when the village men violently throw a rock that breaks her car window, or when her father-in-law does not allow her to sell the saw, or when he refuses to give his DNA to aid in the process of identifying his son’s body.
By the end of the film, I am left in awe of Fahrije’s relentless perseverance. She takes everything in stride and even when the entire village is seemingly against her, she pushes through with the foresight to know that only she has the power to chart her own path, to pave the way so her children can grow up with love and opportunity as opposed to hate and repression.
As a human race, I believe we’re drawn to stories of perseverance. It adds perspective to our own lives, and nearly everyone can relate to having a dream and facing obstacles. When we see others struggle, and not just struggle but persevere, it gives hope and determination that we too, can endure through difficult times.
Blerta Basholli is proof of this endurance. She grew up during the Kosovan War and was a teenager when it ended. She saw the power of filmmaking to tell her stories and made her way from Kosova to NYU Tisch School of the Arts and back again. She is dedicated to telling stories of strength and survival; stories that represent her Albanian-Kosovan culture. This legacy will doubtless inspire the next generation to continue to seek out storytelling as a mode to deal with all the love, joy, grief and atrocities that life brings us.▮