An adolescence interrupted in Blerta Basholli's "Dua"

“Dua” had been in Basholli’s head long before she made “Hive.” For years, she said, she carried it less as a plot than as a feeling, something she knew she would eventually have to make but kept setting aside.

In the meantime, she first adapted another woman’s story. In 2011, after four years in New York, where she had earned a graduate degree in film at N.Y.U., Basholli came home to Kosovo and went to Krusha e Madhe, a village in southwestern Kosovo where, on March 25, 1999, Serbian forces separated the men and older boys from the women and led them away. Two hundred and forty-one people were killed or went missing that day, and around 60 of the bodies were never found, including that of Fahrije Hoti’s husband.

Hoti spent hours telling Basholli how she had lived since: how she had learned to drive, becoming the first woman in the village to do so, and how she was mocked for it; how she had gone door to door looking for work, and been turned away; and eventually how she gathered other widows in her village to make ajvar and sell it. That became “Hive,” with Yllka Gashi as Hoti, a performance that won awards at several international festivals. This was the story that Basholli told first, while the girl from Ulpiana waited for her turn.

She waited for the making of “Hive” and everything that followed its premiere, and only once that film was out into the world did Basholli sit down with her producers, particularly Valon Bajgora, to tell them about the story she wanted to do next. There was no script yet, not even a page, so she simply explained, describing in a few minutes a film that, at that stage, existed only in her memories. She wanted to make something based on her own life, she told them, about being a teenager in 1998 and 1999, and about how she and her friends had tried to hold on to some kind of normal life in a situation that was anything but normal. She told them how badly they had wanted to have parties, and how the police seemed to be waiting for them at every turn, beating people in the street and entering cafés to force everyone out.

“Valon is my generation, and he understood right away what I wanted to touch on, even though he didn’t know where the characters were going to go,” she said. “He trusted the story. I told him it wouldn’t be a film about the war in the primary sense of the word. It would be seen through the eyes of teenagers, with the war as a constant backdrop.”

Once she began writing, Basholli had to return to those years and ask herself what she actually remembered. She went to people her own age with one question: had they really thrown parties during the day? They had, and one friend told her that the parties had been a way of escaping reality. 

“It was a way of discussing these things again, for myself and for the audience, in the sense of what we went through, and what that period meant for us,” she said.