My globetrotting journey through my Letterboxd Map finds me in Kosovo this time around for Hive.
Title: Hive
Director: Blerta Basholli
Premiered: January 31, 2021 (Sundance Film Festival – United States)
Runtime: 1 hour 24 minutes
Fahrije’s (Yllka Gashi) husband went missing during the Kosovo War. There are no signs of his whereabouts and nothing to provide closure to his family.
When her husband’s beekeeping business isn’t providing enough to survive, Fahrije decides to start her own business. She sets out to harvest and sell ajvar, a red pepper preserve.
She tries her best to recruit other women in her town to join her, a strength-in-numbers mentality against the oppressive patriarchal state. But given the society she lives in, her efforts are frowned upon. A woman shouldn’t have ambition and drive to go out and run her own business.
The entire town is actively rooting for Fahrije to fail, with the local women afraid to empower themselves due to what others might think. Meanwhile Fahrije is simply trying to provide for her family.
Yllka Gashi carries the whole film. She brings a determined tenacity to Fahrije. Struggling to survive, selling her missing husband’s table saw in order to provide for her family, trying to maintain fragile relationships within her family, all while the majority of the town – both men and women – are actively working against her. Despite the feeling that we’re always kept an arm’s-length, it’s not hard to find yourself rooting for Fahrije to succeed. “Fight the power” and “damn the patriarchy” are easy messages to get behind, especially in 2026.
Unfortunately, the rest of Hive doesn’t live up to Gashi’s performance. It’s said to be based on a true story, however, it feels very paint-by-numbers. There’s nothing that really differentiates it from any other drama where an individual is fighting “the system” with the odds stacked against them.
Clocking in at only 84 minutes, this somehow manages to feel both too long and too short. The pacing is inconsistent, with the middle third crawling along at a snail’s pace, ultimately making this feel much longer than it actually is. The lack of character development/depth for everyone other than Fahrije also leaves a lot to be desired.
Overall though, while I wouldn’t say it lived up to the hype it received at Sundance when it premiered, I would say this is worth checking out at least once solely for Gashi’s performance.