Basholli's 'Dua' Review: War Through a 13-Year-Old's Eyes
Get the Culture newsletter
Daily culture — film, music, books, the trends and ideas worth your attention. Free.
- Blerta Basholli's 'Dua' is the Kosovar director's sophomore feature, following her Sundance-winning 2021 debut 'Hive,' and draws on her own girlhood in wartime Kosovo
- The film follows 13-year-old Dua (played by Pinea Matoshi) through a deliberately subjective camera locked into her perspective, with radio news broadcasts and jagged sound design implying geopolitical horrors just outside the frame
- Dua faces harassment from Serbian boys and men on her walk home from school, who lace catcalls with ethnic slurs — prompting her to take judo lessons with hardened refugee classmate Maki (Vlera Billali) before her retaliatory anger draws retaliation on her family
- Lead Pinea Matoshi was discovered by Basholli when the director came to audition her sister Kaona, who was cast in turn as Dua's on-screen sister Tina — a casting chain the review calls one of the film's piercing moments of emotional realism
- The review calls 'Dua' 'a good film that, by its nature, stops short of greatness,' praising Matoshi's 'deceptive simplicity' while criticizing the stream-of-consciousness structure for lacking the cohesion of traditional drama
- Cinematographer Lucie Baudinaud captures Dua's family in long, unbroken takes that frame the protagonist as one puzzle piece within a larger portrait of relatives fighting their own private and frontline battles
Why it matters: Basholli's sophomore feature follows her Sundance-winning debut 'Hive' and draws on her own girlhood in wartime Kosovo, offering a female-centered counterweight to male-dominated war cinema while building on the festival-circuit momentum her first film established. Cinematographer Lucie Baudinaud's unbroken long takes and the discovery of a non-professional lead (Matoshi, found via her sister's audition) underscore a continued investment in naturalistic, locally-rooted filmmaking.
