Mardhë

A family of four must live an everyday life while the world around them shatters during the armed conflict 2001. While the bombing is ongoing these two parents are in a constant dilemma, protecting and sheltering their children inside thefour walls of their home, as they beg to play in the sun, or allowing them to play and have a childhood, while they’re still young enough to be shielded by their innocence and ignorance. Whatever may happen, summer cannot stop its flow. As the watermelons grow ripe, the tobacco leaves dry and turn to gold, colonies of ants gather their food, the clock never stops ticking, and the bombs continue to fall around the mountain of Ljuboten.

Home and comfort can often be found in things that shame, trap, and damage us. Leaving that home can be difficult, but having it as a poltergeist that follows you around proves to be even harder.

On a cold April morning in a small village beneath the mountains, Milena hurriedly packs what remains of her family’s life as distant echoes of war creep into her home. With her young son Jovche, she leaves behind a house filled with memories, children’s toys, and a fragile sense of normality. Walking through narrow streets crowded with silence, the encounter with the neighbors who look like shadows to her and Jovche’s friend Arben becomes a wordless goodbye to the life they once knew. At the bus station, marked by the scars of violence where bullet holes spell out the word “death”, Milena hesitates between the safety of the past and the uncertainty of what lies ahead. When the bus finally arrives, mother and son step into the unknown, carrying only what they could save — and the quiet hope that survival might still lead them to something better.