18/02/2011

The last film presented in competition at the Berlinale, Joshua Marston’s The Forgiveness of Blood [+see also:
trailer
film profile] finally shows us a country that is little-known to the rest of Europe, partly because its film industry is still almost non-existent.

Albania’s isolation is also internal: its inhabitants, hardly directed or helped by the State, are in a sense left to their own devices, each cultivating and managing their plot of land as they see fit. This means that the family at the centre of the film, for example, live amid the cement and breeze-blocks of a constant building site.

School is also the least concern of the fathers and grandfathers who govern local life, guided by the age-old Kanun, the set of unwritten rules used to perpetuate a basic, patriarchal justice system whereby "the slightest insult" offending someone’s male pride can legitimately give rise to bloody vendettas and which can too be cobbled together as one pleases.

Two realities meet from the film’s opening scenes: on the one hand is a rurality that seems to belong to another century, with its stony roads where horse-drawn carts still circulate; on the other hand, there are youngsters equipped with mobile phones and Facebook profiles, some of whom aspire to go on to study. But that’s without taking into account the value of land and the resulting violent conflicts, such that two families end up killing each other on the edges of a legal system that fades into the background beside atavistic practices.

When the father and uncle of Nik (17) and his sister Rudina (15) are accused of stabbing the neighbour, after the latter refuses to leave them right of way, opprobrium befalls the entire family. After the father goes into hiding, the neighbour’s family refuses to grant the boys in the family (women and girls don’t count) "besa", that is permission to leave their house without being killed. The system’s stubborn paralysis is literally re-enacted by the situation in which the guilty men’s family find themselves: they remain between their four walls, waiting for a resolution that is clearly unattainable.

While the boys are deprived of school even though their friends miss them, Rudina has to resume her father’s bread deliveries and negotiate for the family’s survival. From the family home where he goes round in circles, Nik feels both his responsibility and his powerlessness to act – his attempt to call a village dispute mediator, who has about fifty resolutions under his belt (a figure that says a lot about the frequency of such matters), is rejected by his father as an insult, as is his suggestion that he should give himself up, because "we can’t live like this". They may have no say in the matter, but here it’s the children-suddenly-turned-adults who bear the heavy burden of these cruel archaisms.

(Translated from French)