Shame and Money

Visar Morina, a Cologne-based director from the Kosovar diaspora, marked himself out with Babai (2015) and Exile (2020) as a precise chronicler of displacement and unease, and he is one of the strongest filmmakers that diaspora has produced. Shame and Money, co-written with Doruntina Basha, premiered at the 2026 Sundance Film Festival, where it won the Grand Jury Prize in the World Cinema Dramatic Competition. It came out of the festival with a 100% score on Rotten Tomatoes.

Shaban and Hatixhe are dairy farmers raising three daughters in rural Kosovo. When they can no longer make the land pay, they are forced to move to Pristina, where the indignities of urban poverty and the steady pressure of money close in on the family. Morina works in a controlled social realism and draws taut performances from Astrit Kabashi and Flonja Kodheli. He allows the film neither sentimentality nor despair, which is harder than it sounds with material like this.

The Sundance jury embraced it as one of the festival's real discoveries, and that perfect critical score put it among the most acclaimed European titles of the season. It is a film about the shame that scarcity breeds and about what it costs to leave the land behind. It also extends Morina's portrait of Kosovar lives caught between a difficult home and an elsewhere that does not want them.