Shame and Money

Visar Morina is one of the strongest filmmakers to emerge from the Kosovar diaspora, a Cologne-based director whose Babai (2015) and Exile (2020) marked him out as a precise chronicler of displacement and unease. 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 and emerged with a 100% score on Rotten Tomatoes.

The film follows Shaban and Hatixhe, dairy farmers raising three daughters in rural Kosovo, who can no longer make their land pay and are forced to move to Pristina. There, the indignities of urban poverty and the quiet violence of money press in on the family. Morina works in a register of controlled social realism, drawing taut performances from Astrit Kabashi and Flonja Kodheli and refusing both sentimentality and despair.

The Sundance jury embraced it as one of the festival's standout discoveries, and its perfect critical score made it among the most acclaimed European titles of the season. A film about the shame that scarcity breeds and the cost of leaving the land behind, it deepens Morina's ongoing portrait of Kosovar lives caught between a difficult home and an unwelcoming elsewhere.