Originally published on INK19 ON July 23, 2026
directed by Visar Morina
starring Astrit Kabashi, Flonja Kodheli, Kumrije Hoxa, Fiona Gllavica, and Alban Ukaj
Eksystent
In a defining moment in the first third of Kosovan director Visar Morina’s heralded debut feature, Father (Babai), ten-year-old Nori (Val Maloku) desperately embraces his father, Gezim (Astrit Kabashi), as he boards a bus to Germany in an attempt to leave his son behind with unstable relatives in their native Kosovo while he searches for work without any clear prospects in the seemingly more economically viable foreign land.
During this emotional scene, which has a raw intensity reminiscent of Italian neorealism, Gezim violently thwarts Nori’s hugs as his son begs him not to leave; however, when Gezim finally boards the bus, Nori throws himself in front of the wheels, resulting in a massive head injury. Concerned for Nori’s health, Gezim remains for a brief period, but once his son stabilizes, he leaves for Germany anyway, prompting the undaunted Nori to take drastic measures to follow him. Nori’s bandaged scalp now becomes a powerful symbol of his strident defiance against anyone or anything that stands in the way of reuniting with his father.
For the promotional poster of his layered and harrowing 2026 Sundance Grand Jury Prize-winning feature, Shame and Money, Visar Morina presents us with the visceral image of the battered head of his film’s protagonist, Shaban (also portrayed by Astrit Kabashi), a dairy farmer from a small village near Kosovo’s capital, Pristina. Shaban is a simple, decent man who works tirelessly but happily alongside his earnest wife, Hatixhe (Flonja Kodheli), to support their three young daughters and his mother (Kumrije Hoxa). Shaban’s youngest brother Liridon (Tristan Halilaj), a layabout who victimizes the family for funds, also resides in the multi-generational home, and another brother, Agim (Abdinaser Beka), a schoolteacher who is barely scraping by on his meager salary, must share the house with the broader family along with his wife and two children as well.
The family’s already tenuous financial situation becomes exasperated when Liridon begins soliciting 1,800 euros from the head matriarch, who controls the household’s money and who knows that the amount would wipe out all of their savings, for a get-rich-quick scheme invented by a delinquent childhood friend of Liridon’s named Agron who has ambitions of taking care of elderly people in Germany. Ever the affable man, Shaban doesn’t protest the request for funds when it’s brought up again at dinner, but Agim, who is well-aware of Liridon’s history of “borrowing” money from Shaban and cringes at Liridon’s dubious description of Shaban as “nice,” violently reacts when the youngest brother accuses him of hiding money from the family and forces Liridon to shamefully leave the table. In the days that follow, Liridon secretly departs with Agron for Germany, and to pay for their nefarious venture, he spitefully steals the family’s sole source of income, their dairy cows.
Angry at the betrayal but focused on survival, Shaban briefly flirts with the idea of transitioning his farm away from dairy into agriculture, but when Hatixhe reveals the grim return rate for vegetables, Shaban packs up his wife, mother, and children and moves to the nearby city of Pristina, where Hatixhe’s sister Lina’s (Fiona Gllavica) husband, Alban (Alban Ukaj), an affluent club owner, has promised the couple employment as a cleanup crew in his establishment. For a place to live, Alban sets up an apartment for the family in a colleague’s building that requires a rental payment, which Shaban and Hatixhe have, but the landlord also requires a deposit, which they do not. Alban offers to pay the deposit, but Shaban’s mother proudly refuses and surrenders the money in the form of a sole gold Lira coin, her only valuable possession and her last token of her family’s survival and strength through the Kosovo War.
Now settled in their new urban environment, Shaban and Hatixhe begin their work in Alban’s club, but unfortunately, Alban can only give them three days a week there, which, given the high expenses of city life, is not nearly enough, forcing them on their days off to take to the streets and wander into any business they can find to ask for work that no one has available. Subsequently, Lina, who is getting paid a belittling paltry sum of twenty euros a week by Alban to care for his paralyzed father, gently demands the assistance of her beholden sister when Alban’s dad needs greater physical care than she can handle by herself. Hatixhe complies and helps her sister without any hesitation, and given the labor exchanged, she feels confident enough to ask Lina for two hundred fifty euros, which Lina reluctantly provides in secrecy.
Hatixhe immediately gives the cash to Shaban, who heads to the apartment of his landlord to exchange it for his mother’s prized lira, which he believed would be held as a deposit. Instead, the landlord informs Shaban that the coin was surrendered for rent and that he had consequently sold it, leading to an altercation that results in a head injury for Shaban. The landlord then throws Shaban’s family out of their place, leaving them no option but to move into Alban’s spare shed behind his home even though he offers them rooms in the house. With the situation growing ever more dire, Shaban, left with no other option to earn a way out of his family’s predicament caused by his outburst, begins to assemble curbside with other unemployable men to work as a day laborer for anyone who drives up with a job in hand.
At first, Shaban gladly takes whatever random work he’s offered, but when wind of his activities reaches Alban via the observations of his well-to-do neighbors, Alban insists that Shaban stop his day labor exploits as they only serve to embarrass him and goes as far as to awkwardly offer Shaban a job as a personal gardener and eventually a handout sum for a few days of work. Humiliated, Shaban initially takes the money but then returns it to Alban at his home while Alban is having dinner with his family, widening the ever-growing rift between them.
As Shame and Money proceeds and brings us alongside every one of Shaban’s actions and decisions, these tense exchanges, some quiet and some not, give the film its subdued but multi-dimensional impact as these moments explore the grey area between charity and honor in front of a setting that only decades earlier had seen the worst bloodshed and destruction in Europe since World War Two. As Hatixhe profoundly explains to Lina during one key scene, “Shame is a luxury,” and as we follow these characters through the difficult choices they have to make to maintain, we become readily aware of the fact that this is not the first time that the exchange of dignity for survival has been a precarious part of their daily lives.
On the surface, Shame and Money may sound like a standard drama of familial and socioeconomic strife, but what distinguishes Morina’s film is the emotional complexity and humanness that he imbues into his main characters, specifically Shaban, his mother, Hatixhe, Lina, and Alban. Hence, we understand their motivations well and can recognize each person’s individual imperfect but reasonable principles around integrity, family, and survival. Tensions rise, like with all families, from misunderstanding when members’ principles fail to align, but that dissonance becomes stronger because of their different experiences of wartime and post-war eras, not because of an inherent malevolence. For example, Alban’s concern for his image amongst his neighbors appears silly and hyper-classist. But, when stepping back, the historical context likely plays a role for him as it does too for Shaban and his mother. Though not fully explained, Alban and his parents did manage to survive the Kosovo War with a measure of wealth, but like most families who lived through the conflict, which came with an understandable level of distrust of the police, the support of your neighbors became paramount for your survival, and thus, their opinion of you could mean the difference between life and death, and perhaps that feeling, like that of emotional scarring caused by family, stays with you throughout your lifetime. Similarly, Shaban failing to provide a CV to Alban may look like an act of disregard, but in fact, it’s one of embarrassment and pride because he likely has never written a CV and wouldn’t have any relevant experience for employers in the city. However, for Alban, a CV would likely be the only route he sees to getting viable work. And lastly, Alban and Lina may seem patronizing in their offers to Shaban and his family, but they do support them more than most families would be obliged to do and certainly more than Shaban’s own brothers who repeatedly exploited his kindness. These recurring conflicts of perspective give Shame and Money a distinguishable richness in the various complications of life stemming from and exaggerated by family, economics, society, and history.
Starting with Father in 2015, followed by Exile (Exil) in 2020, and ending with Shame and Money this year, Visar Morina has created an unofficial triptych of films that starts in a pre-war Kosovo and extends into the present day, elucidating on the promise of a different place and its effect on fatherhood/manhood during this time span. Father gives us a Kosovo that was woefully unprepared for the imminent globalisation that would soon occur and a Germany that was not hospitable to recent immigrants. Exile, set in present day, puts us in the shoes of a Kosovan father who, by all accounts, has assimilated and thrived in Germany but still undermines himself with the paranoia of the perceived stigma of his ethnic background and immigrant status. And Shame and Money, the only film of the three set entirely in Kosovo, presents us with a country where the separation between the pastoral and the urban has become extremely difficult for its own citizens to overcome.
It is a fitting end to Morina’s triptych, as he avoids any semblance of melodrama while raising a myriad of issues that make us question what we are willing to do to survive and adapt in the face of a rapidly changing world that we thought we understood. ◼
Shame and Money opens in Germany on September 24, 2026.
Featured photo courtesy of Eksystent
Lily and Generoso Fierro
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