UKILI KAMSHAT

In the village of Gur, Kosovo, the Swiss-donated cows graze peacefully and the villagers appear to have overcome, or at least suppressed the war and its consequences. Uka, the mayor, runs the municipality in a manner akin to his approach towards his grocer's shop and family, which is to say with stringency and affability in equal measure. The semblance of order is disturbed however when village school teacher Lushe gives an interview to a foreign journalist, during which she admits that she and three other women from the village had been raped by Serbian soldiers, a fact she suppressed after the war, as such mistreatment would have been perceived as a dishonour for the families involved in this most rural and patriarchal of societies. On publication of the article a storm of protest is unleashed among the village's male community; Uka seeks to exclude Lushe from the village community and insists that she was in fact the only woman to have been raped, the other three being purely a figment of her imagination. Labelled a pariah by society, it's not until a woman hangs herself that a dark chapter from Uka's past also comes to light. Nine years after KUKUMI (2005), the first Kosovan feature film to be released after independence and more than a quarter of century after the release of his last Yugoslav film ROJET E MJEGULLËS (1987) Isa Qosja presents a tale of suppression and coming to terms with the past in Kosovo. The film is invested with particularly vitality by the impressive actress Irene Carhani, her adversary Luan Jaha and the images of Turkish cameraman Gökhan Tiryaki, which are at times reminiscent of a classic Western film.