If a married Kosovar couple visits another couple in their village, it usually goes as follows: the men sit next to each other and speak loudly; the wives sit together and whisper. If the daughter of the married couple has a boyfriend, she has most probably to keep it secret from her father. Maybe she would tell her mother, but in most cases the mother would not tell it to her husband. And if Serbian soldiers raped this woman during the Kosovo War, she would most probably take this traumatic experience – and all the sufferings linked to it, too – to her grave.
The 2014 film Three Windows and a Hanging (Tri Dritare dhe një Varje), directed by Isa Qosja, is set in the Kosovar village of Gur, where Lushe, a teacher, does the unthinkable in the context of a Kosovar village society dominated by men: she tells a journalist that three women of Gur and herself have been raped by Serbian armed forces during the Kosovo War. Nobody in this peripheric place in Kosovo really shows solidarity to Lushe as a rape survivor. Instead, ordered by Gur’s mayor Uka, Lushe gets excluded from the village’s life. The reason: in the eyes of Uka and most of the villagers, Lushe stained the honour of the village by making her own tragedy public.
Still of Three Windows and a Hanging via Niko Films.
