Hive

(Zgjoi)

dir: Blerta Blasholli

2021

Hive is based on a true story about a woman just trying to get by in this world. The problem is: this fucking world in which we live.

Some parts of this world seem to be easier to live in that others. For Fahrije (Yilka Gashi), the reality is she lives in a part of the world where seemingly the entirety of society is stacked against her, for no good fucking reasons.

I guess it helps to set the scene as to where and when. The where is Kosovo, the when is after the Kosovo War in the late nineties, and the reality is that Fahrije, like a lot of other women, hasn’t seen her husband since the massacres began.

There are a lot of mass graves waiting to be excavated, still. I had hoped there would a time in European history when new mass graves would stop being dug, and yet when you see what the Russians are doing AGAIN in Ukraine…

I despair. I am not as strong as Fahrije. She doesn’t despair, she just keeps moving forward.

She is a Kosovar Albanian. She has two kids to look after, and her wheelchair bound father-in-law. I don’t know why, but she is not allowed to get a job. The society, the community doesn’t tolerate women working or even really spending too much time out of their homes.

This community doesn’t even like the idea of women getting their licences and driving cars.

So, she has no husband to work and provide the family money, but it is also frowned upon for her to work and support her family. Clearly the best thing to do would be for them all to die.

Fahrije is not alone in this predicament. A group of women whose husbands similarly haven’t returned or whose remains haven’t yet been identified, also have no means of support and stop themselves from doing anything that would draw the ire of the menfolk.

It’s paralysing to watch this kind of thing. Someone offers them driving lessons or work, and the women tell themselves and each other “I cannot do these things, they will all call me a whore”. And true to their word, random men call Fahirje and any other woman whores for daring to support themselves and earn a subsistence living.

Everything is slow and agonising in coming, but Fahrije is persistent. Where the other women fear what the community will say, Fahrije sees that lack of choice they are being offered (this charity set up for the women barely has any money for their day to day lives, and there’s no widow’s pension or government help, apparently) as giving her all the more motivation to succeed in her endeavours.

Because she’s got no other fucking choice.

The title comes, we think at first, from the fact that one of the only recourses or resources Fahrije has is the honey from the beehives her husband left behind. But the honey isn’t selling, and she needs something else.

If you’ve eaten ajvar and liked it, then I don’t know you or understand you, and probably never will. It seems the people of this region like ajvar, though, made as it is from roasted peppers, and Fahrije gets the idea that making ajvar collectively, all the widowed women together, could be their ticket out of penury.

But the men, the local men…not only are they worthless, they are irrationally hostile and moronically destructive. We never really hear from them directly. They never plead their cases, angrily or otherwise. We just see the disgust on their faces, and the results of their actions. Someone from the local café throws a huge rock through her car window as she’s driving, just because she’s a woman driving.

Later they attack her business directly. But we never understand why, and I guess it doesn’t matter what their pathetic reasons are. Fahrije doesn’t care either, if anything she just becomes more determined, more steely in her resolve.

Her father-in-law, who seems to be a gentle-hearted man, is on the side of the men, of course. “What you do reflects on the family, good or bad” he tells her multiple times. Trying to survive is “bad”? Trying to have a business that helps multiple families is “bad”?

You fucking backwards morons.

He, too, eventually has no choice but to jump onto the Fahrije bandwagon. The stupidity of these men’s pathetic misogyny is enough to make the other women cower, but not Fahrije, so it is heartening to see the other women, fearful as they are, slowly come into her orbit.

Her own daughter, like many daughters of a certain age, is dead set against her and, perversely at first, wishes her mother would fail too. Of course, does anyone need to point out to her that her mother failing at this endeavour means she and her family starve or end up in the gutter?

There’s no reasoning with teenagers sometimes.

Fahrije doesn’t give up, though. Through persistence, through stubbornness, she will bend the world to her modest desires, and will form around her a hive of industry that will benefit many, with her as the queen bee, of course

Throughout this all are attempts to find her husband’s remains – she has to convince her father-in-law to give a DNA sample in order to track him down, but when we think the moment of truth has come for Fahrije, the moment of certainty, we realise she’s not ready for it, and maybe doesn’t even really need that closure in order to go on.

This is mostly a quiet movie, modest in its scope, loyal to its main character; it’s not showy, there aren’t grand speeches changing anyone’s mind about anything, and Yilka Gashi mostly just has to look really, really determined every time she does something, whether it’s smoking a cigarette or fending off sexual assault.

That look, though, of steely determination, is worth a thousand words, is worth ten thousand scenes of exposition or explanation. Hive works, and works so well, only because of it.

8 times I find myself being quite scared of the bees, THE BEES! out of 10

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“We’re not doing this just for you, but for ourselves. For all of us.” - Hive