Shame and Money

youareaboy4.5

Bill Clinton jumpscare

Robert Daniels4.0

There isn’t a single false beat in director German–Kosovan filmmaker Visar Morina’s anti-capitalist venture “Shame and Money.” This is the kind of austere yet hard-hitting film that reveals the apathy of a system without relying on melodramatic speeches or explanatory dialogue. Morina’s film is a confident, smart, and tightly calibrated work. The film follows a Kosovar dairy family whose life is upended with the selfish younger brother (Tristan Halilaj) of Shaban (Astrit Kabashi), sells the farm’s cows and absconds to Germany with the profits before the rooster even crows at dawn. This family is forced to uproot their once simple life for a far more fragile existence in the city. There, they find a tenuous refuge with Adelina (Fiona Gllavica), the sister of Shaban’s wife Hatixhe (Flonja Kodheli), and Adelina’s husband Alban (Alban Ukaj). To find some brief stability, the family’s elderly matriarch uses her last gold lira as collateral on a new apartment. Hatixhe works with her sister caring for her sister’s rich in-laws. Shaban takes janitorial work in his brother-in-law’s club, clearing bottles and dishes. None of that effort is enough to make ends meet, so Shaban begins looking for odd jobs, with many other men, on the side of the road. It’s an act that puts him at odds with his brother-in-law, who wants his family to maintain their reputation. [full capsule review via RogerEbert]

JBird4.0

When a family loses their cow,They must figure out what to do now. And they don't mind,Working in kind,To survive in the city somehow.