Home Sweet Home

Youngsters Drita and Luan are barely able to recognise their father. Blerta, the youngest of the siblings, embraces the new man of the house, even though she's hardly seen him before. All of this wouldn't necessarily be a problem, were it not for the fact that wife Ana is now earning a respectable salary as chairwoman of the local association for bereaved families, not to mention that local school principal Bashkim has applied for European funding for a new school building under the name of martyr Agron Gashi. A survivor is thus compelled to act as if he still numbered amongst the dead, and he stays at home, where Bashkim drops by to proudly speak of the designs for a memorial to be erected in his honour in the school playground.

In his first foray into feature film production, Kosovar director Faton Bajraktari has come up with a cleverly understated black comedy and intimate portrait of a society unable to move forward, bound as it is by myths of war and those who profit from the double standards of the cult of martyrdom. BB