Sundance winner Hive tells a true story of hope in a hopeless place

The boundaries of a rural village can be as firm as a closed door. Leaving seems impossible, but staying is suffocating. Hive, Kosovo’s official submission for next year’s Best International Feature Oscar, probes at the limits of a contained community, and the sexism and conservatism that can fester there. With a riveting lead performance from Yllka Gashi and pointed nods toward the wounds left open by the war in Kosovo (and the widespread crimes of Slobodan Milošević’s regime), this slow-burning Sundance prizewinner makes real both the incremental crawl of growth and the heavy weight of grief.

The roughly 15-month war in Kosovo from 1998 to 1999 generated international headlines in the middle act of Bill Clinton’s presidency. It took another decade for Kosovo to declare independence and transition from a province to its own country. Hive should not be confused for a history lesson on the subject. It does not attempt to trace the ins and outs of what a United Nations-supervised court called Yugoslavia’s “systematic campaign of terror, including murders, rapes, arsons and severe maltreatments” toward Kosovo’s citizens, in particular its Albanian population. Nor does the film exactly contextualize the forces of nationalism and ethnic and religious persecution that led to the war, or wade into arguments about whether what happened in Kosovo was technically genocide.

Instead, writer-director Blerta Basholli focuses on the top-down effects of the violence and the devastating absences it caused. During the war, men were taken from their homes and disappeared, and in the decades since, their bodies have been found in dozens of mass graves under Serbian car parks, at mines, and on police training grounds. Hive opens outside a white tent in which lines of bagged remains await identification. The lingering specter of the men who never came back haunts the village of Krusha e Madhe.

Here, Fahrije (Yllka Gashi) has been waiting for years for news of her husband, Agim. Each day, she tends to the bees he so loved, waiting for news of retrieved bodies. Each night, she dreams of being underwater, searching fruitlessly for some sign of her spouse. Is he dead, his body tossed in the village’s river, where no fish live? Or did he run away, and leave her alone to raise their two children and take care of his father, Haxhi (Çun Lajçi)? Her loneliness plays out in Gashi’s slight squint, her set jaw, and her straight back. She did not ask for any of this responsibility, but it is her burden to carry.

She is not alone. Hive moves across all of Krusha e Madhe to capture the smallness of the place—just a few houses, a cafe, and a building the remaining wives, mothers, sisters, and daughters use as a women’s center, where they receive monthly donations from a local nonprofit. Money is scarce, jobs are nonexistent, and there are mouths to feed in the form of children who never knew their fathers and older men too infirm—or maybe just lucky enough—to avoid the war. Yet the village’s conservative community frowns upon women driving, working, or going into the nearby city.

Hive, which is based on a true story (complete with end-credits update on events), takes off from Fahrije’s decision to start making and selling the roasted red pepper sauce ajvar—a professional move that makes her a pariah among the verbally abusive men of the village. “You have to know your place in this family!” Haxhi yells, and his disdain is mirrored by the men cinematographer Alex Bloom captures in the periphery of the frame, hurling rocks and hissing insults. Their constant surveillance has a claustrophobic effect that Hive contrasts with the local women banding together to peel roasted peppers, attend a protest demanding answers on their loved ones, and trade stories of their wedding nights. These are the film’s most poignant scenes.

With limited dialogue, Basholli’s script makes clear how much these women have to do with so little. At first, conversations are short and direct. They speak in desperate, hushed tones about how they can barely afford flour and oil, let alone other food. They look around before bringing up the possibility of remarriage. An innocuous invitation from Fahrije for neighbors to come in for coffee is considered with furrowed brows and hesitation.

Often shot in profile, with minute changes in her expression capturing her myriad frustrations, Gashi does wonders with different kinds of silence. We understand her melancholy as she considers the bee stings dotting her body, which her husband never received while tending to the hive; her resentment when Haxhi refuses DNA testing, which makes identifying any body as her husband’s practically impossible; her curiosity as she puffs on a cigarette outside the women’s center, listening to her peers argue about whether the benefits of learning how to drive outweigh the dangers from their fellow villagers. All this quiet, and disquietude, enhances the power of the words she does speak, including her delivery of a beseeching “Don’t you see none of us is okay?”—a sentiment that could double as the film’s log line.

To the detriment of certain relationships, Hive uses the overwhelming patriarchy of Krusha e Madhe as narrative shorthand. Some motivations feel overly rushed, with the film relying on the immediacy of viewers’ offended reactions. But as a whole, this is an immersive portrait, buoyed by a central performance that’s hypnotizing in its sparse naturalism. What Basholli has made is a thoughtful, humanistic exploration of the fortitude needed to summon hope in a time and place resigned to hopelessness.