Right of way

Falja e Gjakut (The forgiveness of blood)

Crit

The chaos! The insanity! The sudden unpredictable lurching directional shifts! The vomiting!

No, not in the movie, on the walk to and from the theater, on sidewalks packed with green-clad celebrants of what I like to call the Festival of Drunken White People (though in fact, the drunken people are not altogether homogeneous--and most, I suspect, would object, perhaps violently, to being called homo-anything). Inevitably, the once innocent "Kiss Me, I'm Irish" T-shirts now have the "Kiss" crossed out and replaced with "Blow," or don't even bother with that much subtlety and go straight to "Fuck."

But the movie: well, even if I'd seen a few Albanian films, I suspect this would be the best. A man is killed for the stupidest of reasons (well, maybe not the stupidest: that would be for wearing a "Fuck Me, I'm Albanian" T-shirt), and as a result one of the perpetrators receives an 18-year jail sentence, but because his brother and accomplice flees, the offended family has a formal, if extralegal, right to exact revenge on one of the fugitive's sons, so they--teenaged Nik and his young brother--become shut-ins, unable to leave their home safely.

Their mother and sister, Rudina, inherit the responsibility of supporting the family, immune by sex--in theory, at least--from feud harassment. The stress on all of them--including Klinsmann, the horse who pulls the cart from which Rudina sells the bread the family bakes--is palpable. Nik's behavior veers from bored frustration to irrational destruction to a climactic heroic gesture, and the barely visible cracks in Rudina's determination to shoulder a task far beyond her years are heartbreaking. A wonderfully affecting film.