When Blerta Basholli premiered her debut feature Hive in 2021, it played like a small miracle. The Kosovar Albanian director broke records at Sundance, taking the Grand Jury Prize, the Directing Award, the Audience Award, and delivering her country its first entry on the Oscar shortlist, even if the conditions that produced the film were anything but cause for cheer. Hive drew on the true story of Fahrije Hoti, a widow who lost her husband in the ethnic massacres, caught between financial struggle and the ruins of a grief-petrified patriarchy, ultimately finding an unlikely solace among other women with a common fate. Born in Pristina and raised under the violent rule of the Serbian campaign, Basholli told that story with such earnestness, anchored in dense realist camerawork and memorable performances where collective talent and personal sentiment felt inseparable.
In her sophomore feature Dua, premiering at the 2026 Semaine de la Critique, Basholli inverts her vantage on the same war. While Hive revelled in the aftermath, the director’s latest reaches to its whim, to the months when ethnicity began to harden into a death sentence. Her titular protagonist (Pinea Matoshi) is a 13-year-old Kosovar Albanian girl with the face of a model and the fearlessness of a boy, for whom the attacks from the men loitering in dark alleys have become routine abrasions she has learned to absorb, until one morning everything tilts. A classmate from a close family friend’s household is killed. She was one of the over 10,000 victims of a Serbian regime that justified its violence through the founding myth of the 1389 Battle of Kosovo, the so-called “cradle” of the nation. What is happening geopolitically penetrates Dua’s perceptual field through the silent observations of streets, the monotone of the evening news, and eavesdropping on her parents’ conversations in the kitchen. Her father, jobless and stripped of standing, attempts to get by installing iron grates in flats, while in the shops, Dua’s imperfect Serbian more often meets neglect. Then a new displaced girl arrives in class and opens up the world of taekwondo, and an unlikely friendship offers the heroine a sliver of self-protection in a society that no longer affords her any. Her recklessness, that volatile mix of teenage instinct and outsized nerve, will eventually put the family at risk — especially its men, who are the first to come under police scrutiny and with whom Dua is most connected.
The pairing of political turmoil with the coming-of-age narrative, particularly when centred on a young female protagonist, is something academia has rigorously examined, often reading the adolescent body as a site onto which broader national upheavals are metaphorically inscribed. With her steady stare and quiet fortitude, Dua emerges as a near-perfect figure for Kosovo at the close of the twentieth century: barricading for defense, training herself to strike back where possible, and clinging ever more tightly to familial bonds before their inevitable rupture. Where films of this kind often remain confined to a half-deluded adolescent gaze, Basholli extends her protagonist’s intuition into the form, following Dua through streets and stairwells with restless handheld tracking shots that shadow every turn as her dangerous curiosity leads her toward vigilance and imminent threat. The debuting Matoshi is captivating in a role thick with dense dialogue and physical demand under omnipresent close-up. Even if she does not fully achieve the slow emotional unravelling the script gestures toward, she holds the dawning recognition that the fight is much larger than she is.
Taking time to settle into its cadence, Dua becomes more engaging and emotionally resonant the nearer it draws to the war, which serves as a point of closure. Its early stretches around more conventional teen film beats — where a first menstruation is essentially followed by a first kiss — sit a little inert against the pressure of what follows. But as adults’ brutality accelerates the tempo, the film acquires a sharper edge, with dialogue landing in an earned bluntness that feels unmistakably indexical to the present. By the time the news cycle delivers the long-awaited NATO intervention, the brief lift of relief curdles almost at once into skepticism about what an American campaign can actually do. Though the 78-day bombing run arrested a genocide nearing full ignition, it could not recover the more than one million Kosovo Albanians expelled into nowhere, families fractured along the roads, nor the brave young girls like Dua.
Comments are closed.