Shame and Money

 Shame is a luxury. 

This is the premise, as simple as it is ruthless, of Shame and Money, directed by Visar Morina. When the need to survive forces people to accept any conditions, humiliation itself becomes part of the price they must pay. They cannot afford the privilege of feeling offended, because refusing a job, challenging abuse, or resisting the will of those who pay may mean losing even what little they have left. Poverty does not merely take away money: it progressively narrows the possibility of choosing how to live. 

Morina portrays this process without turning it into a sociological demonstration or an overt indictment. The direction is austere, the screenplay works by subtraction, and the performances avoid unnecessary emphasis. This is a film that trusts images, silences, words spoken almost in passing, and reactions that never come. It is precisely this refusal to explain everything that allows so much to be understood. Alienation is not presented as an abstract concept, but as a daily experience: having to ask, wait, obey, make oneself available, and swallow humiliation because there are no viable alternatives. 

The move to Pristina marks the transition from a condition of relative independence to one of increasingly pervasive dependence. Shaban, accustomed to defining himself through his work and his ability to provide for his family, finds himself forced to accept casual jobs and conditions that contradict the image he has of himself. His is an extreme form of occupational alienation: instead of guaranteeing independence and identity, work becomes the mechanism through which both are eroded. He works to survive, but survival requires him to surrender a part of himself every day. 

What makes the film particularly incisive is the way this subordination extends into family relationships. Alban, the husband of Hatixhe’s sister Adelina, belongs to a more affluent world in which money and property confer the power to determine the terms of relationships. In their luxurious home, Hatixhe looks after Alban’s disabled father, performing essential care work within a relationship of dependence that offers her no genuine autonomy. Family assistance is not simply an act of solidarity: it also becomes a means of defining roles, obligations, and hierarchies. 

Alban matters not merely because he has greater resources, but because he can exercise the power they confer without necessarily acknowledging it as such. His position allows him to give, demand, set limits, and remind others where they belong. “Everything has its place, including people”: the line encapsulates a worldview in which social hierarchy takes on the appearance of a natural order. People, like objects, are assigned a specific place; those with the power to assign it can present the subordination of others as something obvious, even reasonable. 

This is where Hatixhe’s story acquires an importance of its own. Her experience is not merely an appendix to her husband’s. Domestic and care work, often invisible precisely because it takes place within the family, reveals another face of alienation: that of someone who must be useful, provide care, adapt, and meet other people’s needs, without being able easily to separate their personal worth from the services they provide. Even when the work is indispensable, the person performing it can remain subordinate. Hatixhe is caught in a specific contradiction: she makes a concrete contribution to the functioning of the family that takes her in, yet this very dependence limits her ability to escape the conditions imposed on her. 

In this system, the home is not necessarily a place of protection. It is also a property that can be granted or withheld, a space in which it is decided who is welcome and who must remain outside. “Don’t come back to my house again”: the sentence turns belonging into a revocable privilege. Those who own nothing can be excluded even from places where they have worked, offered help, or sought shelter. Security depends on the will of whoever holds the keys, and gratitude risks becoming a permanent obligation for those who receive. 

In this sense, Shame and Money tells a story that extends far beyond the specific context of Kosovo. Precarious work, the devaluation of skills, economic subordination, and the progressive loss of control over one’s own life are recognizable well beyond the country’s borders. The film does not need to artificially universalize its story: the concreteness of its situations makes it emblematic. Shaban and Hatixhe inhabit a world in which work no longer necessarily guarantees dignity and independence, while the ability to escape an unjust relationship depends on resources that the very relationship prevents them from accumulating. 

The urban landscape also reflects this contradiction. The statue of Bill Clinton in Pristina, a symbol of liberation and US intervention in Kosovo’s recent history, stands near men waiting to be hired for a day’s work. The distance between the monument and those bodies in search of a wage introduces a political irony that the film does not need to spell out. The promise of national liberation coexists with a form of economic enslavement that continues to shape everyday life. Being free as a citizen does not necessarily mean being free in the material conditions of one’s existence. 

The same contradiction can be found in Marigona Hill, the luxury residential development where Shaban finds work as a security guard. The streets are clean, the gardens carefully maintained, the homes protected and orderly. It is an environment in which everything seems to have its place. Yet that order also depends on the work of people who do not share on equal terms in the prosperity they help maintain. As a precarious worker, Shaban guards a privileged space from which he remains economically and socially excluded. The cleanliness and tranquillity of the place do not erase the conflict; they make it less visible. 

Shaban’s gradual transformation finds its most powerful expression in the face of Astrit Kabashi, whose performance is extraordinary. His face registers what the character struggles to articulate: bewilderment, humiliation, the restrained tension of someone still trying to preserve an image of himself as circumstances make it increasingly untenable. When Shaban confesses that he no longer knows who he is, that he can no longer see or recognize himself, the film reaches its most radical core. This is not simply a crisis of self-esteem. It is the fracture between who he believed himself to be and what material conditions are forcing him to become. 

Shaban is progressively deprived of the very things through which he once recognized his own worth. He is not merely a man who has become poorer; he is a man who can no longer find himself in his actions or in the eyes of others. It is a form of dispossession of identity. 

The title brings together two terms that the film constantly places in relation: money determines the conditions of survival, while shame registers the human cost of those conditions. But when one cannot afford to refuse, even shame can no longer become a form of resistance. 

The parallel with Ken Loach’s Sorry We Missed You is clear in the way work invades private life until it compromises it. In both films, the man expected to provide for his family becomes trapped in a system that progressively deprives him of autonomy and control over his own existence, while women’s care work remains underpaid or invisible. But whereas Loach exposes the machinery of exploitation through schedules, deliveries, and performance targets, Morina focuses on what that system does to the individual: the loss of dignity and, in Shaban’s case, the difficulty of recognizing the man he has become. 

Morina does not simplify this progression into a linear trajectory, nor does he turn despair into a heroic gesture. Some passages remain ambiguous, suspended between what happens and what the character imagines or recounts. This uncertainty prevents his crisis from being reduced to a single explanation. The violence that emerges is not an isolated personal aberration, detached from its context: it takes shape under pressure that progressively narrows the range of possibilities, without thereby becoming automatically justifiable. The film leaves viewers to measure the distance between the need to understand a man and the temptation to judge him. 

Part of Shame and Money’s strength lies in what it refuses to do. It does not turn its characters into mouthpieces for a thesis, offer easy absolution, or seek to move the audience through insistence. The screenplay works by subtraction, the performances maintain a rigorous restraint, and the direction allows meaning to emerge from situations. The political dimension, too, develops without slogans: it takes shape in the distance between those who can offer work and those who must accept it, between those who own a home and those who risk being expelled from it, between those who can impose conditions and those who cannot afford to refuse them. 

Shame, then, is not merely an individual feeling. It is also the price a system imposes on those in the weakest position, asking them to silently endure what they would not accept under conditions of freedom. Money does not simply buy goods or services: it can buy availability, obedience, and even the renunciation of one’s own identity. This is the extreme form of occupational alienation portrayed by the film: working to preserve one’s existence and, in doing so, progressively losing the ability to recognize oneself in it. 

Shame and Money is a beautiful film, marked by rare precision. It creates the conditions for understanding what is usually dismissed as an individual problem: poverty, shame, failure, the loss of self. Behind each of these words lie power relations, material conditions, and denied possibilities. And there is a man whose face, almost without the need for words, conveys the moment when survival ceases to be merely a struggle to live and becomes a struggle not to disappear from oneself. 

The worker becomes poorer the more wealth he produces. 

Karl Marx