Aga's House

(Shpia e Agës, Lendita Zeqiraj, Kosovo/Albania/Croatia/France, 2019)

This is a compelling, absorbing naturalist/realist drama, a little in the Maurice Pialat style. That is to say, it employs jagged, wayward scenes, unusual sequential breaks, and a long-withheld exposition. It’s impossible to predict its moment-to-moment turns in mood and focus.

Aga (Arti Lokaj) is a 9-year-old boy who lives in a State-granted house (seemingly in the middle of nowhere!) with five adult women; he secretly searches, between times, for his father. The background of this general panorama of social devastation and disorientation is the aftermath of the Kosovo War at the end of the 20th century, with its legacy of war crimes including rape and sex-trafficking. But writer-director Lendita Zeqiraj steers away from a too-rigid specificity of historical and national reference.

Even before being men or women, even before being Albanian or Croatian, even before being Muslim or Christian, my characters are first and foremost simple and random people who find themselves in a state of limbo at the end of the world. They are on the verge of disappearance or growth, depending on how things transpire. They are people who, at a certain point in their lives, were struck by tragedy.

In the course of what we are privileged to see, the boy doesn’t yet find his Dad – only the shifty Cera (Basri Lashtaku), an ambiguous type of father-figure/substitute. He’s banned from getting anywhere near the house, because of his dark history with one of its inhabitants. The motor of the story comes not from that, but a particular crisis: when one of women of the house attempts suicide, Aga is the only person around to manage the situation – for which he must call on the reluctant aid of Cera. There is a particular knot tied into this incident: Aga has been taking language lessons from the self-inflicted victim – a process of education designed to help him find his father, who may likely be already dead.

The best thing about the film is the way it unsettles and subverts the worst miserabilist clichés of a tale of this kind: expected catastrophes do not take place (the abuse of the boy, or the confrontation of Cera and his ex-wife when he shows up at the house). The drama always comes from somewhere else, such as the witnessing-through-overhearing of Aga’s origin-story (born of a rape). Even the ending is subdued, agreeably clipped: Aga running in the night, accompanied by the voice of one of the women singing in Italian. There is, in fact, a lot of singing threaded through Aga's House; it both ends and starts with that, opening on the charming spectacle of the boy’s song comprised of cigarette names!

A paradox at the film’s centre is that, even though the house represents, to all intents and purposes, an enforced community of different people who would never have chosen freely to live together, they do, in some sense, come and value and enjoy each other’s company. Which is not to say that Zeqiraj skimps on the inevitable irritations, clashes, bitchiness and disagreements in their daily routines. In this mosaic of multiple languages and frequent misunderstandings, “Shut up!” is heard frequently.

In a generally mean and nasty, post-war environment – details of brutal domestic violence are imparted in the women’s recollections – Zeqiraj is confident about including relatively decent moral and ethical acts: Cera helping the troubled woman, and giving Aga half of the ‘fee’ money he accumulates. In a looser and bawdier vein, there are some stunningly wonderful portraits of stoned hilarity (and frankness in relation to sexual-relationship matters) shared by the women and Aga. Beyond the love-and-family circles of reference, we also observe an old Aunt who, it appears, has simply been discarded by life, loss, passing time … Amidst all this colourful detail, even the transparent device of staged ‘filmed interviews’ (an old indie-film standby, at this point!) works quite well.

An intriguing balancing-act is performed successfully here: the thread – more underlying than overtly dramatised – involving Aga’s longing to find and love a father (see the touching moment of his gesture of hugging) is never allowed to overpower the women’s story. The variegated spectator-sentiments inevitably lurching to the side of one gender or the other are thus commendably kept in check.

Zeqiraj, a Kosovan arts school graduate of the early 1990s who further studied filmmaking in France, is noted for shorts made since 2004, such as Fence (2018) and Balcony (2013). As yet, she has not been able to follow up on the rich promise of Aga's House with another feature.

© Adrian Martin November 2019 / April 2025