Visar Morina: I Felt it’s Essential to Me to Place Something Human in Opposition to Money

Kosovo director Visar Morina is remembered by the Sarajevo audience from 2020, when his film Exile won the Heart of Sarajevo for Best Narrative Feature Film at the 26th Sarajevo Film Festival. Six years later, Morina returns to Sarajevo with a powerful story about a married couple who, faced with financial hardship, are forced to do whatever it takes to keep themselves and their family afloat. Rather than portraying his protagonists as victims, the director presents them as honest, hardworking people who, regardless of how others see them and treat them, continue to persevere day after day in a society determined to cast them aside. With this in mind, Shame and Money is a powerful story of resilience, perseverance, and humaneness.

How has your perspective as a filmmaker evolved since making Exile?

I feel like the last few years have been transformative – not just for me personally, but for all of us. Transformative might actually be too small a word. It feels like we woke up in a completely different world, and I’m afraid we’re only just at the beginning.  As a filmmaker, I’ve felt a growing need to be more grounded in my work, grounded in the here and now, in what is actually happening around us, and trying to make sense of it.

 

For research, I went to Kosovo. I looked into the housing and job markets and spoke with people who were searching for both. Beyond the existential hardship that drove those people, there was also shame that came with it.  Shame in front of others and shame in front of oneself. “Even your mom doesn’t love when you are broke,” said a man who stands on a certain street corner every day offering his services as a day laborer. He sounded strangely embarrassed when he said this, as if the words had slipped out.

The image of the mother is iconic in Kosovo. If there is one certainty in life, it is a mother's love. The sentence sounds even cruder and more direct in Albanian, describing someone who has just realized that even a mother's love must be bought. This sentence set the tone for me. Even years later, there is nothing I associate more with the film than this sentence.

When it came to the actual filming, we tried to capture the reality as closely as possible, at least that was the goal.

At the same time, to consider the question of what it means to assert oneself every day. What it does to a person, what it does to their self-image. Preserving dignity! Fine, but how, when I have nothing to eat? I believe that it is impossible to maintain a reasonably healthy self, whatever that self may be, if I constantly have to assert my worth to others and, even worse, to myself. If I have to prove every day that I can do something, that I am worthy of being part of something, that I am this and that, that I can do this and that...

It inevitably leads to exhaustion and depression.

 

The film is fundamentally about what is commonly called integrity or dignity. Hatixhe and Shaban are fighting for their dignity while slowly disappearing, in a society where the only thing that seems to have value is money. That is why it felt essential to me to place something human in opposition to that. At its core, the film is about the price of being human and that is what we tried to show, including through the relationship between the two.

How did you approach exploring masculinity, dignity, and vulnerability through Shaban’s character?

I still haven’t figured out what masculinity actually means. If I break down the term – what does it really mean, what is it? What I do understand is what it means to be privileged, or to have power over someone. Shaban loves and Shaban cares, and he tries to help whenever he can – just like his wife Hatixhe does, or his mother. He is not in a difficult situation because he is a man. He is in a difficult situation because the situation itself is difficult. And as a man, he might actually be better off than others in it.

A lot of the film’s emotional power comes from what is left unsaid. How did you work with the actors to create performances where the audience can feel everything through silences, gestures, and small, quiet moments?

Working with the actors is the greatest joy for me – as is working on the sound. We tried to keep the technical aspects as minimal as possible in order to give the performances more space. What helped enormously was the element of work itself – the physical tasks within the scenes. Because the characters were busy most of the time, because there was always something to do, it helped the acting feel natural and grounded, and the work itself set the rhythm.

 

The line between empathy and exploitation. There is one scene with the jacket, when Lina brings her sister a present and Hatixhe doesn’t quite know how to receive it. But more broadly, I felt that the stronger and more nuanced the Albanian family dynamic, the stronger the film would be.

 

Certainly. Though in the film it is less about the promise of happiness and more about the basic question of whether you can simply survive and have a life with some degree of dignity, in a surrounding where money functions like a virus.

 

What does the line “Shame is a luxury” mean to you, and what do you hope the film provokes in the audience?

What I love about that line is the way it raises the question of point of view, from which position we judge or feel something. It is ultimately also a question of power and class.