Morina's 'Shame and Money' Hits Sarajevo After Sundance Win
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- 'Shame and Money' won the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance earlier in 2025 and is now playing in the main competition at the Sarajevo Film Festival (Aug 14–21), where Morina previously won in 2020 with 'Exile.'
- The film follows Shaban (Astrit Kabashi) and Hatixhe (Flonja Kodheli), a rural Kosovo couple forced off their farm after a family betrayal, who descend into Pristina's hyper-capitalist gig economy — culminating in Shaban working as a night watchman at a gated community he describes as designed to keep out 'poor people like us.'
- Morina took the film's emotional core from a Kosovan man who told him 'When you're broke, even your mom doesn't love you,' and called the country 'a land that's largely failed to make good on the promises of the post-war order.'
- The director explicitly positioned the film as a European warning, telling Variety: 'We are actually coming to a point in Germany where it feels like we are going straight to a situation like this in Kosovo. It's a look into the past and a warning to the future.'
- The production is written by Morina and Doruntina Basha, produced by Vicky Bane and Schuldenberg Films with co-producers across Slovenia, North Macedonia, and Albania, with world sales handled by The Yellow Affair and Espoo.
Why it matters: Morina is using a Sundance-winning platform to argue that Germany's post-war social contract is eroding toward the kind of hyper-capitalist precarity already entrenched in post-independence Kosovo, warning of a 'sozialer Frieden' — point of no return in social harmony — that policymakers in richer European capitals have so far treated as someone else's problem.
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