Kosovo’s Oscar® 2019 Entry for the Best International Feature ‘ZANA’
After losing both their sister and their mother to the Kosovo war two days before it ended, filmmaker sisters Antoneta Kastrati and Sevdije Kastrati, tell a very personal tale in ‘ZANA’.
ZANA premiered at the Toronto Film Festival. It was released recently in Kosovo and is one of the country’s top theatrical openings.
Los Angeles-based director/co-writer Antoneta and her sister, cinematographer Sevdije, both graduated from the American Film Institute. The screening, held at AFI, was attended by classmates and family, including the director’s husband, co-writer and producer of the film, Casey Cooper Johnson, an American who lived for 10 years in post-war Kosovo producing documentaries and television who Antoneta met in Kosovo with whom she has now been working for 17 years. At AFI he wrote and directed the short film Unmanned which screened at AFI Fest and Tribeca. He is currently completing a documentary for Brave New Films on voter suppression in U.S. elections.
Antoneta holds a Masters Degree in Journalism. After surviving the conflict and studying journalism she began to make documentaries about post-war Kosovar society, including her most recent short, She Comes in Spring, which premiered at the Busan Film Festival.
Sevdije Kastrati is Kosovo’s first female cinematographer. Her 2018 LGBTQ-focused feature, The Marriage, directed by Blerta Zeqiri, opened in theaters in Kosovo early last year and caused quite the buzz.
The two of them had very different aspirations before they became filmmakers. They had planned to become doctors, however the war changed that. Antoneta says she could even read a book and lost motivation.
Antoneta, Sevdije and Casey picked up cameras right after the war when they saw Bowling for Columbine and they were making documentaries. Antoneta also began interviewing the women and photographed the consequences of war which eventually led to their making ZANA, Antoneta’s first fiction feature.
She said,
In war you are isolated. You are in shock, questioning how it is possible that this is happening, all of society is disintegrating and you want to document it.
The idea for ZANA incubated a long time as we were dealing with death; we lost our sister and mother. I wondered what if I were a mother? Could I have moved on? What if you cannot protect your child?
ZANA is, reasonably so, a very female film. Haunted by her long-suppressed past and pressured by family to seek treatment from mystical healers for her infertility, a Kosovar woman, Luma, played Adriana Matoshi, struggles to reconcile the expectations of motherhood with a legacy of wartime brutality.
Told in very different styles, though reminiscent of Russia’s current Oscar submission, Beanpole, the loss of a child, whether in war (or in peace) shapes the psyche of women in ways that are unfathomable to male medical or psychological doctrine or theory.
For this reason, the two films, both of which explore new grounds of reproduction and parenthood during today’s widespread outbreaks of war and resistance, reveal women who endure the pain of giving birth and losing their children and who carry within them secrets of humankind which need to be told.
Hearing these stories may have the power to redirect the direction the world seems to be taking into a better pathway toward creativity beyond the biological and into the artistic and cultural channels which can redeem mankind.
In ZANA, the protagonist, Lume, (played by Adriana Matoshi) has dissociated from sex. We do not know if it is because her husband is a brute — though we learn later that is not the case and that they have been married since falling madly in love when she was very young. The sexual attraction has not diminished. Nor do we know whether she suffered rape during the war and that is why she dissociates. Her family assumes she is suffering from a medical malady or is under a spell. The mystery of the film — which sometimes goes on a bit too long — is what makes her unresponsive, and in the end, adverse to giving birth to a child.
She lives life as if she were dream-walking and at night her dreams awaken her husband by the sobs and screams. Antoneta says,
Dreams connect you to the world of the dead (to our loved ones). Dreams are the only thing we truly have the can connect us with the dead in a real way, in the present after someone dies. Unlike memories and flashbacks that are from the past. You wake up and they are not really gone. You were there in the dream. It was present. You awake and you are asleep. Dreams are as real as waking life.
The user-review from IMDb by Raven-1969 says what I would say:
ZANA is dedicated to the mother and sisters the director lost in the war and drawn from Antoneta’s own experiences. Antoneta also interviewed Albanian women whose experiences followed similar patterns. In exploring wounds of war ZANA avoids the easy answers and the macho attitudes that make it harder for women to heal. Antoneta hopes to start conversations about the war and help women to talk about what they conceal inside. This is not the sole reason to see ZANA, it is also a beautiful, jarring and well-crafted film. Though it is from a new director, actors, filmmakers and country, it is polished and enthralling.
As posited earlier, this dovetails perfectly with Beanpole’s source of information, Nobel Prize-winning author Svetlana Alexievich’s The Unwomanly Face of War: An Oral History of Women in World War II.
These three highly accomplished works, ZANA, Beanpole and The Unwomanly Face of War, all speak to the world about war’s effects on women, children and even on those unable to speak. In the words of Svetlana Alexievich,
“Women’s” war has its own colors, its own smells, its own lighting, and its own range of feelings. Its own words. There are no heroes and incredible feats, here are simply people who are doing inhumanely human things. And it is not only they (people!) who suffer but the earth, the birds, the trees…all that live on earth with us. They suffer without words which is still more frightening.
Lume is a victim of war, suffering without words as the animals, trees and birds.
Watch the trailer here.
Looking at the production, surprisingly well done for a first film on a small budget, Antoneta tells the audience during the Q&A that the crowd scenes were mostly their relatives.
The wailing was done by my aunt who is also a professional wailer for funerals, and the wailing was actually very real and made everyone cry. A lot of the extras in the scene had lost family members during the war.
Crew was drawn from five countries as there are not enough trained crew members in Kosovo. The crew members played many roles; there is no union to limit them.
Looking at the behind-the-scenes at the production team, I see my friends, co-producers Brett Walker and Miguel Govea, partners at alief. Miguel Govea is a Venezuelan born producer with extensive international experience in film, television and music. A former publicist for Paramount Pictures and NBCUniversal/Telemundo producer in Los Angeles, Miguel is Head of Production & Distribution at alief. Miguel is working with partners Wide (FR), 39Films (IT), Magnet (GE), Kauzare (BR), Madlove (CO) and La Rue (US) on a slate of productions that includes series and feature films. Govea executive produced for alief, Samuel Galli’s critically acclaimed supernatural feature Our Evil a Brazilian production which World Premiered at the 39th Moscow FF 2017, competed at Sitges FF 2017 and won Best Latin America Feature Award at Macabro FF 2017. In the fall of 2017, Miguel produced with his partner Mr Brett Walker the Eurimages-supported debut feature Negative Numbers by Uta Beria. Their next projects include the film adaptation of the popular Latin American comic book series and novel I Love Zombies by Cesar Oropeza. In 2016, they expanded their company by opening film production branches in Georgia and Venezuela.
The international sales agent is alief. The film is slated to show in Palm Springs, Trieste, Glasgow, Goteborg Film Festivals. Its Albanian theatrical release will be late January 2020. Alief is now considering U.S. distribution from arthouse distributors with N.Y./ L.A. limited release in the mix for the second quarter 2020.
