Hive

We are immediately given a sense of our environment in the opening scene of Hive. A hardened, stoic woman quietly slips under police tape and begins unzipping body bags to hopefully identify the belongings or remains of a loved one – one in which we learn soon after is her missing husband who disappeared in a Kosovo War massacre years earlier. This becomes just the backdrop of the many issues facing Fahrije Hoti (Yllka Gashi) and her young family. Presumably widowed, Fahrije is left to keep her family afloat in a small Kosovo village that still believes that women – even ones abandoned by war and its casualties – belong at home. Simple things such as working, carrying a driver’s license or selling a late husband’s tools are condemned. In Hive, we follow Fahrije as she fights the patriarchal misogyny by rallying her widowed counterparts together to build a business selling their homemade ajvar (red pepper spread). 

Hive is a quiet film. There are sparse scenes with aggressive Hollywood-esque confrontations. Many moments of tension are shared within conversations and stretches of silence, within the hardened face lines of our heroine, and within long hand-held takes. The simplicity of the narrative style adds a layer of realism to its already naturalistic recollection of the real-life Hoti and her post-war survival. Hive almost feels like a documentary in the way it follows a family through all the ugliness of poverty, misogyny and war. 

Gashi gives an authentically powerfully performance as a passive woman quietly but tenaciously fighting for her independence when everything and almost everyone is stacked against her. Hoti is not glamourous or endearing and in some scenes, the stresses of her surroundings make her unpleasant. However, Gashi exudes Hoti’s good qualities through quiet moments; a small smile here or there with her family, bathing her disabled father-in-law (a palpable Çun Lajçi) despite his misgivings towards her desire for independence; the drive to keep her husband’s bee colony alive, knowing full well it brings in no income and the daily stings deem not worth it. She is a lioness sans the roar. 

First-time director Blerta Basholli captures not so much the life in wartime, but more the minute residue of it in the years that follow. Hive is not a war film: it is a biopic of a woman and her resilience in the face of grief and discrimination. It is a tale of a feminist in an anti-feminist developing country. It is a woman fighting to stay alive. A woman fighting the patriarchy is certainly not new territory in film, but Basholli’s direction, Gashi’s sobering performance and Alex Bloom’s capturing of life in the blistering heat of Kosovo poverty, Hive stands above the rest as a powerful tale of a woman with little means, but with more determination to overcome them. 

4/5 stars

Hive
In cinemas Thursday 24 February 2022
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