Set in the village of Krusha in the aftermath of the Kosovo War, Blerta Basholli’s Hive follows the story of Fahrije (Yllka Gashi), one of many Albanian-speaking women whose husbands disappeared during the Krusha massacres in 1999. She and her fellow widows have formed a women’s organization for the dual purpose of mutual aid and pressuring the local authorities to find the victims, identify them, and hold the perpetrators accountable. To support what’s left of her family, Fahrije comes up with a plan to produce ajvar, a condiment made from roasted bell peppers, and sell it at the village supermarket. Drama ensues as she struggles to overcome resistance from the intensely patriarchal villagers, including her father-in-law, Haxhi (Çun Lajçi) and even her own daughter, Zana (Kaona Sylejmani).
Hive is mercifully devoid of smarmy moralizing. For Fahrije, survival is the order of the day, and her absent husband’s beehives simply don’t produce enough honey. Realism takes many forms, and what we have here is something that one might call strugglecore, a celebration of scrappiness and determination in the face of archaic sexist horseshit. This is symbolized by the image that opens the film, of Fahrije in a protective suit surrounded by an angry swarm of bees, some of which have managed to crawl in through tears in the fabric. To endure the stinging gossip of her fellow villagers, she will need psychic armor too.
Beyond survival, Fahrije never states her deeper motivations outright. Basholli leaves the heavy lifting of characterization to Alex Bloom’s brooding cinematography and Gashi’s intensity as an actor. This adds a layer of ambivalence that facilitates viewer identification with Fahrije but also makes her a distinct character and not just an archetype.
As Fahrije waits for confirmation of her husband’s fate, there’s a growing sense that, deep down, she doesn’t want an answer. The indefinite suspension of the villagers’ expectations for her, as a woman either married or unmarried, allows Fahrije to act for the first time as neither and both, to imagine survival on her own terms. As a work of fiction, then, Hive asks its audience to dwell in this tangle of grief and liberation alongside her.
Understandably fixated on empowerment, Basholli glosses over stickier issues which might complicate Fahrije’s heroism. The film ends before we learn how she treats her employees, what she pays them once her business is established, and what becomes of the women’s organization as it turns into a labor force for the production of ajvar. With this evasiveness, the film’s commitment to realism falters. Exploitation, like empowerment, takes many forms, and one is left wondering what happens to Fahrije once she’s become the queen bee.
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