“Are you pretty with now not sound asleep at night?” an employer asks a candidate for a lowly security guard space, behind in Kosovan director Visar Morina‘s contemporary film “Disgrace and Money.” The demand refers merely to the job’s delinquent hours, although it’s particular person that varied characters in this stoic, slowly lacerating ogle at financial desperation and exploitation in up-to-the-minute Europe could perchance well furthermore stand to be asked, for a diversity of causes. Broke and anxiously navigating the city menial employment market after having to abandon the household farm, middle-ancient Shaban (Astrit Kabashi) is lying unsleeping most nights, whether he’s working or now not. In the meantime, those increased up the capitalist meals chain doubtlessly aren’t tossing and turning almost as indispensable as they could perchance furthermore aloof be.

Winner of the Gigantic Jury Prize in Sundance’s world cinema competition, Morina’s third characteristic sees him turning his point of curiosity abet to his insist of origin, after his very excellent, likewise Sundance-premiered 2020 sophomore effort “Exile” provided a bitingly humorous ogle on the Kosovan immigrant expertise in fashionable Germany. There would possibly be markedly much less humor within the studied, achingly sober “Disgrace and Money,” which again examines social outsider living, but this time with wealth and class — whether inherited or all straight away bought — because the dividing boundaries. Even supposing his most fashionable is a unhurried burn offering tiny within the potential of hope or levity, Morina doesn’t exchange in one-show conceal miserablism either: Intricately noticed domestic dynamics withhold the drama textured and humane, as does Kabashi’s delicately layered performance as a man softly beaten down but screaming on the interior.

A considerably protracted first act, living in a dusty rural village now not removed from Kosovo’s capital Pristina, introduces a bunch of knotty tensions and conflicts within the prolonged household of dairy farmer Shaban, his greater half Hatixhe (Flonja Kodheli) and their three younger daughters — and that’s smartly forward of an inciting setback that relocates the circulation to the city. While Shaban and Hatixhe score a modest but stable living, with his mother Nana (Kumrije Hoxa) fastidiously managing the household earnings, Shaban’s irresponsible, work-worried younger brother Liridon (Tristan Halilaj) is in determined want of cash. A third brother, the contemporary-tempered Agim (Abdinaser Beka), has no want to lend a hand, but Shaban is an more uncomplicated mark — and when Liridon takes off by shock or payback, the household is left in dire financial straits.

With the farm all straight away unsustainable, there’s nothing for it but to pack up and watch work in Pristina, where Hatixhe’s sister Lina (Fiona Gllavica) lives a contented nouveau riche lifestyles in a trim, gleaming contemporary-score home courtesy of her entrepreneur husband Alban (Alban Ukaj). Alban isn’t one for handouts, but he does offer his nation-bumpkin in-laws fragment-time employment as a cleaners at a nightclub he owns — a considerably high-handed therapy of kith and kinfolk that is echoed in Lina’s awkward domestic affiliation, where she’s paid scant pocket cash to work as a carer for Alban’s sick, disabled father (Selman Lokaj). Even while you marry up, it seems, you’re briskly reminded of your correct insist on the social ladder.

The work provided by Alban isn’t enough for the couple to score cash, least of all in a up to date-to-them city economy where every little thing from renting an residence to developing a financial institution withdrawal comes with hidden costs. Yet their makes an strive to rep supplementary employment are continually thwarted — along with by Alban and Lina, who possess it embarrassing for the household for Shaban to be seen as a day laborer, and persistently instruct him to polish up his non-existent CV as an change. Even supposing Hatixhe pointedly reminds Lina that disgrace is a luxurious most can’t come up with the cash for to feel, she’s equally uneasy about taking cash and items when her sister provides them. Morina’s complex screenplay has tiny passion in honest binaries, which tends to streak away the politics unspoken. As an alternative aside, it keenly watches how each persona locates the actual stage of personal corruption at which they feel able to characteristic in a society built on the underside line.

Interjections of strident folk singing sporadically disrupt the film’s in any other case muffled, throbbing soundtrack: bitter signifiers to the characters and viewers alike of extra efficient, extra rustic systems of lifestyles which bear been forcibly left within the abet of. In total favoring intimate, nervy monitoring pictures, Janis Mazuch’s cinematography is fluid and unassuming — place for in one showpiece shot, circling a raucous musical gathering in Pristina’s central city square. There, the digicam furthermore swirls spherical the surreal landmark of a Invoice Clinton statue, looking out at passively over the bustle of the city from a lofty peak. To somebody who cares to ogle up and watch, it’s a quaint reminder of when the long bustle, and Eastern Europe’s westward-having a ogle financial beliefs, regarded fairly varied from the cynical survival fight of as of late.