“Of shame and money” in the cinema | Shame is a luxury

The farming family runs a small farm in rural Kosovo. Photo: ©Janis Mazuch You can be very grateful these days when you are presented with a cultural product that neither blames some fantasized "wokies" for global fascisation nor convinces you that all the fascist voters are just terribly underprivileged poor sheep who can't do anything else and so on.

Seen in this way, the Albanian workers' drama “Of Shame and Money,” which is now showing in German cinemas, is a positive phenomenon. But the film, which won the "World Cinema Grand Jury Prize" at this year's US Sundance Film Festival, making it nominated for the Oscar in the "Best International Film" category, not only manages to avoid the anti-woke, culture-fighting monotheism of the bourgeois culture industry, but it is also a captivating and very precisely observed social thriller.

First of all, it's about the farming couple Shaban and Hatixhe, who run a small farm in rural Kosovo. The main source of income is the sale of animal products, such as the milk from some cows, which enables the two and their three small daughters to make an acceptable and sufficient living. However, when Shaban's unemployed brother steals the cows, sells them and runs away, the family loses their livelihood overnight and is forced to start over in the Kosovo capital Pristina. The reasonably wealthy family of Hatixhe's sister organizes accommodation and some precarious work and income opportunities, but soon Shaban in particular feels humiliated, especially by his dependence on his slightly younger brother-in-law Alban.

The focus of director Visar Morina ("Exile", "Babai") is less on the plot than on showing what it means to be one of the producers of surplus value in times of late capitalist crisis, and the great Kosovar actor Astrit Kabashi plays Shaban, who is fighting for his dignity, as a worker who is constantly sweaty and never able to rest, but whose efforts are hardly enough to finance a tolerable life for the family.

What we are presented with here is the unvarnished reality of life for the majority of humanity, who are dependent on selling their labor to a capitalist “labor market”.

Morina shows Shaban's struggles not primarily as part of a story to be told, but as the real, true being of a man in his early fifties who literally experiences firsthand the "being one stroke of fate away" from the existential crisis that characterizes capitalism. Since Shaban and Hatixhe have no choice but to find money somehow, given their responsibility for their children and Shaban's mother, who moved with them to Pristina due to a lack of alternatives and is now looking after the three girls, Hatixhe takes care of her sister's bedridden father-in-law, while Shaban works at her brother-in-law's club and as a day laborer. It is precisely this act of hiring oneself out, becoming a thing, that bothers Shaban, while brother-in-law Alban worries about the family's reputation, which he sees at risk from a brother-in-law peddling himself on the street.

We repeatedly see Shaban trimming hedges, setting up plastic chairs and finally knocking the proverbial stones in long, uncut close-ups. What we are presented with here is the unvarnished reality of life for the majority of humanity, who are still dependent on selling their labor to a capitalist “labor market,” which means that people like Shaban are dependent on the private owners of the means of production for their entire existence. The closer Morina and his cameraman Janis Mazuch get to the working individual - and they often get very close to him, and Mazuch hardly takes his eyes off Kabashi - the more it becomes clear how much an entire family depends existentially on the father and mother somehow getting money and not collapsing from shame, despair or simply physical overload. And how much this situation can depress and humiliate people. As the game progresses, it becomes clear that the story of Shaban and Hatixhe is, first and foremost, a study of the conditions in which people have to live and reproduce under capitalist conditions, especially outside of the capitalist centers. Soon Shaban can no longer bear the indignity of his situation, becomes violent and aggressive, and therefore loses several jobs, thereby putting his family's existence at risk.“Shame is a luxury,” Hatixhe once tells her sister, and when ultimately, at least apparently, everything turns out for the better, as Shaban is offered a comparatively well-paid position as “security,” he explains his new task to his wife in brief words: “Keep poor slobs like us away.” Shaban now works for a security company that is supposed to secure an exclusive, fenced-in settlement for the rich.

The humiliation of Shaban is therefore twofold. First of all, he is robbed of his dignity because, as a father, he is driven into total dependence. Ultimately, the only way out is a kind of class betrayal by becoming part of a repressive, private force that is directed against his own class members. In Shaban, this degradation is accompanied by violent outbursts and ultimately a brutal, murderous fantasy of violence against one of his “employers”. The film does not show a way out of the misery, no possibility of emancipation from the situation, for example through unions or the like, but rather it points to the immediacy of class and exploitation relationships, to the direct contradiction between the property-owning and property-less classes. Shaban's anger is directed against the exploiters and not against any migrants or woke city dwellers who simply have nothing to do with the matter.

“Of Shame and Money” does not explain why class struggles are (not) successful or to what extent this can be overcome politically. The film is also pleasingly far from assigning blame to specific people or groups, and that is precisely why it is highly political. Because he aestheticizes the tornness of a worker between maintaining his own dignity, class consciousness and the constraints of brutal capitalist normal operations not only vividly, but also with a rawness and roughness that you rarely see in the cinema.

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