Babai Review: Young Kosovar kid follows his immigrant father to Germany
Babai, which means “father” , Kosovan entry for the Best Foreign Language
Film at the 88th Academy Awards , written and directed by Visar Morina had its world premiered at the Munich Film
Festival where won three awards. The awards haul increased in Karlovy Vary,
where the film received the best director nod in the main competition and the
Europa Cinema Labels prize for the best European film in the official
selection.
Babai is most expensive
film made in Kosovo in recent times with a budget of
€1.7 million. This was due to a
co-production between that country (Produksioni Krusha), Germany (Niko Film),
Macedonia (Skopje Film Studio) and France (EauxVives Productions).
The story takes place in the early 1990s, sometime
before the armed conflict with Serbia, the film focuses on ten-year-old Nori (Val Maloku) and his father,
Gezim (Astrit Kabashi),who are trying
to make a living in pre-war Kosovo. The pair survives by selling cigarettes on
the streets and thanks to the hospitality of an uncle who offers them a place
to sleep. When this situation is no longer sustainable, Gezim decides to try
his luck in Germany, leaving his son to be cared for by this relative. But this
is something that young Nori, who is very close to a paternal figure he admires
and imitates, won’t consider as an option. Thus he begins a daring and poignant
odyssey across different countries and landing him in some extreme situations,
which will eventually lead him to confront his father for having left without
him. It’s a story from a child’s eyes that present injustices levelled at
immigrants desperate enough to brave the dangerous journey to greener pastures.
Nori is the audience’s window into the world, he sees everything but, due to
his limited understanding, reacts to very little. His face remains impassive as
he watches and experiences the worst aspects of humanity, and expresses himself
like an animal – with actions and noises instead of words.
Morina’s screenplay is a sometimes annoying
mix of the heart-rendingly credible, the naive and the implausible. Many of the
characters fail to register, but that might be the fault of the blunt editing
instead of the script. There is a lot of space to elaborate characters in a
deeper level, especially role of the father, but the absence of melodrama
in the storytelling is impressive.
In the end it turned out that it was much
more about trust. Babai describes
conflict between son and the father everyone can relate to.
Rating: 6.5/10
Rating: 6.5/10
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
"New Film Directors - New Discoveries" is a blog dedicated to discovering new talents worldwide. Our mission is to empower emerging screenwriters and directors and to shine a light on their work through our blog so they can reach wider audience. Terrence Peterson, the author of the blog "New Film Directors - New Discoveries" is an acclaimed film critic with the degree of philosophy in Comparative Literature at Princeton, the external lecturer at 7 universities, including Princeton and Columbia, and the receiver of The National Order of Merit. All contributors are welcome to send their texts and reviews
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