An 18-year-old girl is killed in a bitter family feud in the Albanian highlands. Her bereaved father is torn by the pressures from a local bishop and an NGO chairman from the capital, not only to forgive the imprisoned killer and his family, as a Christian, but to reconcile with them – as the age-old tribal code, Kanun, once required. A poignant and insightful account of a patriarchal society caught between a lingering past and a precarious present.
Reconciliation is a slow-burning observation of a male conflict in a highly patriarchal Balkan society. A young woman lost her life in the crossfire. My eye, and the camera, focused on the men making decisions about her legacy, witnessing the reality of conversations and rituals – from which, from times immemorial, women were excluded.
There are such conflicts in every family, every society everywhere. Yet here, in Albania, the protagonists were facing profoundly complex circumstances. The dramatic social situation in the 1990s saw the revival of old value systems, along with a half-forgotten ancient code of law, the Kanun. A quarter of a century later, the protagonists in my film still cannot agree on which value system to rely on to resolve the conflict.
The father’s wounds of the past spoke to Albania, and the Balkans, looking back to centuries of unresolved conflict, with differing perspectives. And now, they stood for Europe, where the rising far-right populism is serving to the disenfranchised old solutions for modern problems. The film, together with the protagonists, seeks meaning in a precarious present, and asks difficult questions.
With Reconciliation, I aimed to offer a nuanced portrayal of patriarchy, and a woman’s observation of a feud in it – one that the audiences can also read from the face of the mother in my film, standing silently in the corner.
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