Dua

After being sexually harassed by an adult man, Dua meets Maki, a combative girl who invites her to practise judo. What initially seems like a way to learn self-defence becomes part of a broader quest: finding the strength to resist a reality that seeks to reduce her to helplessness. Meanwhile, ethnic discrimination, repression, and violence infiltrate family life, eventually striking her father directly. Dua's anger grows alongside her awareness of her own vulnerability, until it translates into an act for which she will have to face the consequences.

In Dua, Blerta Basholli chooses to portray Kosovo on the eve of war through the eyes of a thirteen-year-old girl, bringing History down from the distance of political and military accounts to the concrete dimension of lived experience. Violence does not begin when the guns start firing: it is already present in discrimination, in people's behaviour, in the fear that changes the way one walks down a street or looks at a stranger. It is a force that progressively narrows the field of possibilities, turning everyday life into an exercise in vigilance. Even before destroying homes, war alters one's relationship with the world: what should feel familiar becomes potentially hostile, while what should guarantee safety proves precarious.

After being sexually harassed by an adult man, Dua meets Maki, a combative girl who invites her to practise judo. What initially seems like a way to learn self-defence becomes part of a broader quest: finding the strength to resist a reality that seeks to reduce her to helplessness. Meanwhile, ethnic discrimination, repression, and violence infiltrate family life, eventually striking her father directly. Dua's anger grows alongside her awareness of her own vulnerability, until it translates into an act for which she will have to face the consequences.

It is precisely in this transformation that the film finds its measure. Basholli does not need to strip Dua of her childhood to make her a protagonist of war; instead, she shows how war appropriates childhood, imposing problems on her that she should not yet have to know. The girl continues to be driven by the desires, curiosities, and insecurities of her age, while the ethnic conflict around her determines who can feel at home and who must live as though they were always in enemy territory. Adolescence, already a phase of redefining one's identity, thus becomes a permanent negotiation with an environment that seeks to determine her from the outside.

The family represents the most significant counterpoint to this pressure. It is not an abstract refuge, impervious to History, but a space of relationships in which Dua can still experience trust, complicity, and the possibility of being heard. Her bond with her parents and siblings does not eliminate fear, but prevents it from becoming the only possible form of experience. This is a substantial distinction: while political violence constructs rigid affiliations and divisions, the family bears witness to the possibility of belonging without domination. And yet even this space cannot remain intact.

Her encounter with Maki introduces a different possibility. Maki's confidence, fighting spirit, and practice of judo offer Dua an alternative to the passivity imposed by fear. Learning to defend herself means developing a different awareness of her own body: not merely something exposed to the gaze and violence of others, but also a presence capable of reacting. The harassment she has experienced makes this achievement particularly significant. For a girl, the body is already a territory over which others presume to exercise unsolicited judgements and rights; in a context marked by political violence, this vulnerability is multiplied. Judo offers neither a solution to ethnic persecution nor a way out of war, but it gives Dua her first concrete experience of taking the initiative.

Her emancipation, however, does not simply coincide with gaining a sense of security. The anger taking shape within her arises from a succession of experiences in which she recognises the disproportion between what she suffers and what she is allowed to do. When she retaliates against the man who harassed her, her rebellion also takes her beyond the limits of the law, exposing her to the need to answer for her actions. Basholli neither turns this reaction into a heroic act of revenge nor erases its consequences. The issue is more complex: what happens when a person tries to escape violence using the means available to them, but those means do not allow them to break free from the system of constraints in which they live? Anger restores Dua's sense of agency without guaranteeing her freedom.

This is where the film avoids reducing its protagonist to the cliché of the courageous girl who overcomes every obstacle through sheer determination. Dua is combative, but not invulnerable; she wants to become independent, but still needs her family; she wants to defend herself, but lacks the power required to change the conditions that expose her to violence. Her strength does not lie in being immune to fear, but in refusing to be entirely defined by it. Basholli sustains this distinction through a restrained direction, attentive to silences, expressions, and the slightest shifts in the characters' gazes. The camera stays close to the girl, following her reactions without imposing unnecessary explanations and allowing her face to register what words cannot contain.

Even moments of normality acquire a precise meaning in this context. Playing, listening to music, spending time with friends, falling in love: these are not decorative interludes inserted to lighten the narrative, but experiences through which Dua continues to recognise herself as an adolescent rather than merely as the victim of a political situation. Life does not stop producing desires because History turns violent. What becomes increasingly uncertain is the possibility of fulfilling them. Resistance therefore takes on a less spectacular form than the one usually associated with war: preserving the right to desire a future that has not already been decided by others.

Dua shares with the protagonist of Skateboarding is Not for Girls the need to claim, through the body, a space of freedom that the social context seeks to deny her. Whether through judo or skateboarding, physical practice becomes a tool of self-determination, a way of challenging an order that predetermines what a girl can do, be, and desire. For both protagonists, emancipation means reclaiming their bodies from other people's expectations, transforming them from objects of control into subjects of choice. But while skateboarding primarily challenges the conventions of a patriarchal community, in Dua this quest also confronts the violence of History: claiming autonomy means resisting a world that threatens to deprive her not only of freedom, but even of the right to grow up.

The merit of Dua lies above all in the respect with which Basholli constructs this subjectivity. The director does not use her protagonist merely as a device through which to illustrate the persecution of Kosovo Albanians, nor does she sacrifice her individual experience to the representation of the conflict. On the contrary, it is precisely the limitations of her perspective that make the extent of the violence perceptible: one does not need to understand every political development to recognise that something is depriving a girl of the right to grow up at her own pace and according to the possibilities of her age.