A Portrait of director Visar Morina

From the outside, it may look like a fairy-tale of international auteur film: world premiere at Sundance, co-productions from six countries, post-production in Slovenia. But Visar Morina just laughs when I suggest that. “It’s incredibly exhausting. And an incredible privilege at the same time,” he says in a video interview. “You get government funding for an idea, and then suddenly a thousand people are tagging along. But it only works if it’s something deeply personal.” SHAME AND MONEY is personal in every way. The film premiered at Sundance at the end of January and tells the story of Shaban and his wife Hatixhe, two people in today’s Kosovo who love, hope, fail – and slowly break down in a society where everything has its price: work, housing, status and security. And in the end, even your self-image. The initial spark came purely by chance. Morina had taken a photo of actors Flonja Kodheli and Astrit Kabashi on the set of his film EXIL. “They were standing next to each other; he had his arm around her. And I suddenly thought: they could be my parents.” This image gave rise to an alternative story about his parents – not in the Kosovo of the 1990s but in today’s post-war country, which has been reinventing itself inside an ultra-capitalist bubble for the past twenty years.

Morina travelled to Kosovo to do research, talk­ing to people looking for housing, the unemployed, or day labourers. In addition to their existential hardships, they all shared one feeling: that of shame. “Shame in front of others – and of oneself.” Morina describes Kosovo as a place where social processes can be seen with a special clarity. “You see things there that we in the West know only from history books – no labour rights, no social security, extreme inequality. At the same time, this is a harbinger of what is becoming increasingly prevalent in our own soci­ety as well.” Born in Kosovo in 1979, Morina came to Germany as a teenager. He studied directing and screenwriting at the Academy of Media Arts in Cologne.

His debut BABAI premiered at Munich Film Festival in 2015, EXIL won the German Film Award for Best Unproduced Screenplay in 2018, and the later-finished film premiered at the Berlinale in 2020. In SHAME AND MONEY, he returns to the country of his childhood and thus to a society he knows – but one that is now foreign to him. The main character, Shaban, is portrayed as an almost naive figure. “Someone who would never dream of calculating the value of his life,” says Morina. “He helps because that’s what you do. And suddenly he finds himself in a world where he is being asked for his CV. Then, the real question is: What part of me can I turn into money? Morina sees this as a system that not only sorts people according to economic means, but also changes them inside. “I believe it is impossible to maintain a healthy sense of self when you need to prove your worth every day. Inevitably, that leads to exhaustion and depression. And that is what happens to Shaban: quietly and with his eyes wide open, he goes under.”

Morina consistently filmed on location in prisons, police stations, and on construction sites for gated communities. “In a neighbourhood where houses cost over a million, the security guards didn’t have a toilet,” Morina says. “It had just been forgotten.” It is details like these that sharpen Morina’s gaze: it is about observation rather than accusation, revealing his persistent interest in what circumstances do to people. Despite its socio-critical analysis, SHAME AND MONEY remains a love story. “The relationship between the two is almost like a fairy-tale,” Morina says. “There is this unconditional love for each other. I remember that from my parents.” It was only in the editing room that he realised how much of his father resounds in Shaban: “This breathlessness, this silent endurance.” It means a lot to Morina that the film is now competing at Sundance. “These festivals are the gatekeepers. Without them, we wouldn’t get to see many films at all.”

At the same time, he knows how fragile the future path could be. “We don’t have a major distributor or a marketing budget. I just hope the film doesn’t die with the festival.” And perhaps that is where Morina is at his most precise: he is not driven by big ideas but by quiet, inner shifts. The way a body tenses up when it’s stand–ing in front of the employment office. The way a relationship grows closer because everything outside is unstable. How a person gradually loses trust in themselves. “Preserving dignity – that’s fine. But how,” Morina asks, “do you do that when you don’t know how you’re going to make ends meet tomorrow?”

Thomas Abeltshauser