This mystery drama with minimal elements of horror continues the trend in Kosovo film where female directors make films with female leads. More precisely, Antoneta Kastrati actually started this trend with the film “Zana”, but I managed to watch it only after “The Beehive” and several other thematically and stylistically similar films made a year or two later. Kastrati, whose place of residence is Los Angeles, previously filmed documentaries in which she addressed the society there after the war in the late nineties, and she continues to do the same in “Zani”.
However, the typical documentary style that we are already used to when it comes to Kosovo cinematography, this time is enriched with a somewhat mystical, supernatural flair and elements of folk horror that elevate “Zana” above the average. The action here takes place ten years after the war, in a small village somewhere in the west of Kosovo. Lume (Adriana Matoshi) lives with her husband Ilira (Astrit Kabashi) and her mother-in-law, and this woman is under constant pressure to get pregnant and give birth to a child. She constantly experiences spontaneous abortions and never succeeds in carrying the pregnancy, and her mother-in-law especially pressures her, even openly threatening to replace her with a younger woman and chase her away.
It is typical of a primitive, uneducated, depressed village community where the woman is still almost at the level of the husband’s property and patriarchy rules there. That is why it is not surprising that the family will force Luma to give up going to the doctor, but to turn to the local grandmothers, witch doctors, shamans and healers. When that doesn’t work either, the mother-in-law and her husband will force Lume to turn to a well-known television mystic and healer for help, whom everyone is convinced has a solution to her ailments. However, during this process and while she is under pressure to keep the pregnancy and everyone is telling her that it is her fault, some apparently suppressed traumas from the past will begin to surface.
Lume will experience horrible nightmares, and everyone around her will become more and more convinced that she is possessed by some kind of evil spirit, because how else to explain such a situation. Her psychological and mental state will get worse and worse, the healer will even suggest that some kind of bizarre exorcism-like process be carried out on her, and by the end we will understand what and who this “evil spirit” (djinn) is that simply does not allow Luma to continue with life. Matoshi is great in the role of a woman who feels abandoned and abandoned even though she is surrounded by countless people who are unable to understand her deep trauma, because of which she clearly cannot continue to live normally.
While practically everyone around her has somehow continued to live, those traumas from the past continue to haunt Luma as ghosts and demons until she simply snaps under the imposed pressure. Kastrati recorded an exceptional and layered psychological drama full of symbolismwhich in moments almost goes in the direction of thriller, even horror. A woman’s task there is to bear all the horrors, misfortunes and evils she experiences in silence and do what she is assigned, but Lume simply can’t do that anymore. “Zana” was also a Kosovar candidate for the Oscar, but it did not manage to get a nomination, and this drama was screened at numerous world festivals and thus partly opened the door to some later films from Kosovo that premiered at prestigious world festivals.