Made in Kosovo, the powerful drama Three Windows and a Hanging explores each gender’s differing reaction to a wartime atrocity in a traditional culture. This film is artfully shot, and it’s one of the highlights of Cinequest 2015. Three Windows and a Hanging was Kosovo’s submission for this year’s Best Foreign Language Picture Oscar.
It’s set in a village where some of the women had been raped while the men were away fighting in the post-Yugoslavia civil wars. The women haven’t told the men because, in this culture, being raped stigmatizes a woman and brings shame on her family. When the atrocity surfaces in a newspaper report, the men exclaim, “Who has done this to us?”. They’re not talking about the rapists. They’re talking about the rape victim who has disclosed an event that embarrasses them. Of course, this victim-blaming only serves to re-traumatize the already devastated and lead to additionally tragic consequences. It’s a tough subject, but not a tough movie to watch.
Throughout the movie, director Isa Qosja makes superb choices. He loves shots of loooong duration and they are very effective; the first five minutes of the movie are in just two shots. There’s an opening interview, filmed by focusing on the interviewer and her translator, and not even glimpsing the back of the interviewee’s head until the end of the shot. Before the topic of the interview is revealed, we know that it’s painful because of the nervousness of the interviewer.
There are many brilliantly shot scenes, especially one where a boy offers condolences to a man he passes on a road. There’s an interaction between three characters, first shot through one character’s armpit, and then from above and finally in a long shot from behind a window – all telling the audience EXACTLY what’s going on with each character irrespective of whether we can hear what they are saying. And when one character gets some devastating news, he’s in the shower, so we can only see his body stiffen behind the blur of the shower curtain. It’s really remarkable filmmaking.
Three Windows and a Hanging plays Cinequest again on March 2 and March 7 at Camera 12.