![‘Dua’ Review: Blerta Basholli’s Kosovo War Coming-Of-Age Drama Blunts Its Own Urgency [Cannes]](https://www.byteseu.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/DUA_1-Ikone-Studio-Alva-Film-Kazak-Productions-1024x683.jpg "‘Dua’ Review: Blerta Basholli’s Kosovo War Coming-Of-Age Drama Blunts Its Own Urgency [Cannes]")
Exciting new cinema voices have emerged in the last decade or so from the countries that once formed Yugoslavia, but not all of them have dealt directly with the conflict that saw it crumble. Some of the most promising filmmakers of this new wave barely mention the war, focusing instead on younger generations who cannot help but live in the shadow of heavy history. Antoneta Alamat Kusijanović’s “Murina” (2021) centers on the domineering machismo that (speaking from experience) characterizes many a Balkan man, but the terrorizing patriarch at its center is particularly irritable because his Croatian business heavily depends on rich tourists. Who knows if he’d have been forced into such a humiliating position, had the country stayed in one piece? Such complex relations – guilt, bitterness, and regret bouncing back and forth across traumatized generations – give these films a rich texture and a fascinating temporality. By contrast, films that directly address the conflict and its specific events – such as Blerta Basholli’s “Dua,” premiering in Critics’ Week at the 2026 Cannes Film Festival – tend to stick more closely to historical facts and a vivid present-tense.
In those cases, it is the mere fact of these films’ existence, in a context where the war remains an open and festering wound, that grants them a peculiar relationship to our present.
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Focused on a teenage Albanian Kosovar girl (played by newcomer Pinea Matoshi) in the late 1990s, “Dua” derives much of its power from the fact that it was made at all – and indeed, it is the first film from Kosovo to ever play in Critics’ Week. With Kosovo’s independence status still unresolved, Basholli’s film brings us face-to-face with historical events and the painful confusion that has lingered for over 20 years. However, shortly after the initial shock of novelty, the film seems weighed down by this outsized representational responsibility. Perhaps in an attempt to be as universal as possible, Basholli and co-writer Nicole Borgeat opt for some clichéd characterization and story beats – and that predictability stands out particularly harshly against the freshness of the story. Of course, Dua’s older brother is passionate about politics and eager to join the Kosovo Liberation Army; of course, his parents would rather he didn’t get involved. In the middle of this familiar family matrix, Dua is slightly unusual: she does not slavishly follow the rituals of girlhood her schoolmates observe, and she listens to Skunk Anansie. But by the standards of coming-of-age films, this is hardly unexpected, and those signifiers never fully combine into a coherent personality.
Dua’s youth could explain away some of this haziness: she is still figuring out who she is. Even so, her more brazen and interesting interventions come across as ways for the filmmaker to raise a few concepts and themes rather than as organic acts of teenage rebellion.
A key moment occurs when Dua is sexually assaulted and threatened by a Serbian man in the street. The escalation of hostilities from the Serbs – already established in rather unsophisticated scenes of narrative exposition, such as the family watching the news at home or discussing what to do and believe – suddenly becomes very tangible for Dua and the viewer. Here, it seems as though Basholli might be painting another intricate portrait of a society where gender roles and dynamics contribute to various forms of oppression: that is what she did in her debut feature, “Hive” (2021), which won multiple awards at Sundance. Set after the main events of the 1998-1999 Kosovo war, “Hive” centers on a woman who, her husband missing since the conflict, tries to fend for herself by starting a small business in a misogynistic community that frowns upon independent women no matter their circumstances. This feminist critique drew its force from the specificity of that story, the protagonist’s highly unusual circumstances revealing a sexism that was there all along but, until then, accepted. “Dua” offers no such powerful reckoning, in part because it lacks that particularity and individuality. Naturally, its point about how women and young girls are usually the first to suffer the violence of dangerous regimes bears repeating, as rote as it may sound to anyone paying attention to the news in 2026. But the feeling remains that some of Dua’s specificity has been sanded down, to better fit her story into a neatly conceptualized understanding of violence.
Another aspect of survival explored by Basholli feels more labored, the concept again dwarfing the individual. Inspired by a new, seemingly fearless student in her school (the excellent Vlera Bilalli), Dua takes up judo classes: she wants to defend herself against the Serbs. When she runs into the man who assaulted her, she decides she also wants to make him pay for what he’s done. When her newfound sense of agency backfires, it seems like, all along, this narrative strand has mostly served to make a familiar point: no one can self-defense their way out of structural oppression.
Perhaps the way the film arrives at this idea feels abstract and theoretical – rather than genuinely lived-in at the level of individual experience – because this understanding of gender-based oppression does not seem to echo throughout the rest of the film. Why wouldn’t Dua’s keenly felt sense of her own powerlessness in patriarchy extend to her situation within her family, for example? When her father is adamant that the family will not leave Kosovo, his wife, his three daughters, and his son must all obey him – their very lives are in his hands. The film frames the father’s steadfastness as bravery, yet seems oblivious to the disarming fact that, within her own family, Dua is not allowed to decide her own fate. By contrast, “Hive” showed very well that the patriarchy has its fingers in every pie. “Dua” is in some ways an ambitious work, but after the sophistication of Basholli’s first film, we could have expected something more precise and sharp. [C+]
