Blerta Basholli’s 'Hive' film was a breakout at Sundance.
is based, through a Kosovo TV show in 2011. As a filmmaker whose work deals with social and gender issues in her homeland, she immediately felt compelled to meet Hoti and invited Yllka Gashi, an Albanian actor well-known in Kosovo whom she had worked with before, to come along.
Basholli planned to propose making a film about Hoti, and if she declined, “then I would just thank her for what she did and encourage her,” Basholli tells me via Zoom from Spain, whererecently screened at the Valladolid International Film Festival. “But she did not need my encouragement—I ended up being the encouraged one. She’s such a talented, proactive, and brave person. Her character inspired us both and stayed with us, even today.
Because of that very real emotional toll, Basholli met with Hoti only four or five times over the course of years, in five-hour-plus sessions. “Every time she would have to go back through it, and then she couldn’t sleep afterward. I didn’t want her to go through those feelings repeatedly just for my research. I felt like I was harming her for the sake of making a film.”The experience dredged up memories for the director and lead actor as well.
The film offers a view of harrowing experiences that many in the country still haven’t processed. “So many families were separated, so many people lost their loved ones, it just destroyed us,” Gashi says. “As a society I don’t think we ever had a real chance to heal collectively. After the war, everybody came back from the refugee camps, and we were eager to build the country again. There were land mines everywhere, and there was no electricity for eight hours a day, but we still were eager.
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