Tonight, I’m in the commercial heart of London’s film scene; Leicester Square. It’s an early evening Saturday screening, and anyone who has visited Leicester Square at this time will be aware of what an impossible place it is to negotiate. All the big theatre shows are approaching start time, and the situation is not helped by the appearance of the red carpet outside the VUE multiplex that I’m attempting to enter. The carpet in question is probably for Woody Harrelson, whose new film is showing after mine.
There’s something not quite right about seeing festival films at the VUE, they are often quite inappropriate for the setting, and it’s certainly true that many of them will never see a popcorn venue again. That couldn’t apply more strongly to The Forgiveness of Blood, a bleak, micro-budget drama about life in rural Albania. I was drawn to this film as an admirer of the director’s only previous feature, 2004’s Maria Full of Grace. That film told the story of a young girl attempting to escape a poor and lifeless Columbian village by becoming a drug mule, swallowing pellets of cocaine in order to get them to dealers in New York City. It was a quiet classic, offering a detailed insight into the lives of people long forgotten by the system, and uncompromising in its portrayal of their unpleasant reality.
In this respect The Forgiveness of Blood picks up right where Maria Full of Grace left off, only in an even more marginalised setting. The film concerns a family ‘blood feud’, an apparently long-standing ritual that occurs whenever one family accounts for the death of the member of another family, and which comes into force in this case when the perpetrator isn’t brought to justice.
Mark is a father of four with a local bread round. He delivers the bread on a horse and cart. One day, he’s out on the round with his eldest daughter when he finds his usual route blocked. An argument ensues and we learn that Mark has been taking a short cut that causes him to trespass on a neighbour’s land. It transpires that the land previously belonged to Mark‘s family, so he regards the roadblock as a personal insult. A short time later, Mark goes back there with his brother, and the result is that the neighbour is killed. Though his brother is arrested, Mark escapes and goes on the run. It’s at this point the feud commences. Although the matter is in the hands of the police, whilst Mark avoids the law his family must comply with the terms of the feud, which are set out in an ancient text called The Kanun, a local code of law.
The situation appears to be understood by all parties to be inevitable, there is no discussion, and the bereaved family makes no approach to instigate the feud. Nobody from the ‘guilty’ family even raises an eyebrow at the implications, or at least not until they have lived with them for a while. In effect Mark‘s family are placed under house arrest, though this is enforced by nothing besides the implied threat of death should they dare to set foot out of the door; for them to do so is considered an insult to the grieving family. The duration of the feud is apparently indefinite whilst Mark remains on the run, its end only coming with the consent of their neighbours.
The story is told through the two eldest children in the family; Nik, a headstrong young man with a passion for technology and one of his female classmates, and Rudina, the school’s star pupil with plans for university and a career in a more prosperous country. The aspirations of these young characters are perhaps the key to the motives behind the making of this film, as they bring to mind themes of equality of opportunity, and social injustice. Their aspirations are dashed by factors beyond their control, factors created by their environment and particularly by adults living behind the times. Both Nik and Rudina’s plans are completely torn apart by the feud. They are unable to attend school, they can only meet friends in the home, and Nik is forced to keep in touch with his girlfriend via video clips recorded on mobile phones. When a small concession is made that allows the women to leave the house to perform essential tasks for the family, Rudina, previously only concerned with learning, takes to buying and selling cigarettes to try and keep the family’s head above water. Inevitably, the strain of this unofficial imprisonment starts to tell on the sanity of both teenagers, and the rest of the household.
The scenario, and it’s setting, are so unrecognisable that most viewers would surely conclude that the film is set in the past. It’s for this reason that the director goes out of his way to show us that we are very much watching present-day problems. The young members of the family are seen constantly using bang-up-to-date technology in their otherwise archaic surroundings. Rudina uses her mobile phone whilst being pulled around the town by the family’s horse; the evening entertainment in the farmhouse appears to be Pro-Evolution Soccer. It’s clearly vital that we don’t disassociate the events on the screen from our own world.
What the film does incredibly well is to inform with subtlety. For a Western viewer, there is a hell of a lot to keep up with here in order to make sense of what’s happening, assuming that the majority of the audience will be coming into this without too much knowledge of Albanian customs. After the film, I felt I’d understood a fairly obscure set of circumstances, set in a place I knew nothing about without having to work overly hard. You’d imagine that to achieve this, the script would have to include several of those all-too-common segments where the plot is explained in tiresome detail, but this couldn’t be further from the truth. The film could easily be mistaken for a documentary, such is the level of realism, but the dramatic devices are still there and are crucial in enabling the audience to engage.
The aspect of seeing a Western viewer’s perspective on these events is an interesting one. The film is so convincingly authentic that most would guess the film was a home-grown Albanian effort; for instance the dialogue is in Albanian, and it has a cast made up of unknown (at least to me) Albanian actors. Yet the director, Joshua Marston, is an American. It strikes me as too random a choice for an American director to suddenly want to tell the world about life in Albania, there’s clearly a stronger motive behind this; perhaps linked to immigration, and certainly linked to economics. Marston has now made two films, over a seven-year period, with young people for subjects who find that their homeland offers little in the way of opportunity to fulfil their hopes for the future. There are issues being raised here, equality being the fundamental one. After all, it would be unthinkable to watch this film in the USA or Western Europe and not compare the situation of these young people with those in our own society.
The director deserves tremendous credit; I’m happy to be corrected but I can’t think of any other American filmmakers around making low-cost, foreign language, social issue films. To pull it off once marked Marston down as a director to note, but now he’s achieved it twice he surely merits greater recognition. Interestingly, the filmmakers have already had issues with qualification when it comes to foreign language submissions for awards. It is to be hoped that such trivialities don’t prevent this film reaching a much wider audience.
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