Kosovo’s Oscars Entry Highlights War-Bereaved Mothers’ Trauma

The film, called 'Zana', inspired by its director's experiences of losing her mother and sister, has been submitted as Kosovo's entry for Best International Feature at next year's Oscars.

Kastrati's film uses her experience of the grief and trauma of the 1998-99 war as the basis for a poignant drama about a mother whose life was torn apart, depicting how difficult it can be for a parent to put her life back together after the death of her loved ones.

'I had a premonition something terrible would come'

Antoneta Kastrati (right) and her sister Sevdije, who was director of photography on the film. Photo courtesy of Antoneta Kastrati.

"War is the most terrible thing that can happen to a country and it is the worst experience, from which is hard to escape for a long time. All through wartime I had a strong premonition and I wanted not to be at home when a peace agreement was reached. I felt that with the good news, something terrible would come," Kastrati told BIRN in an interview by telephone from her home in Los Angeles.

Years later, while she was still struggling with her nightmares of wartime, she decided to try to overcome her pain by trying to tell her story.

"I wanted to go deeper, to see how something you cannot get back any more, like your lost family members, can transform your life," she explained.

"After the war, despite what they experienced, many women in Kosovo couldn't get proper psychological treatment," she added.

The film follows Lume (played by Adriana Matoshi), a Kosovo Albanian woman who has never been able to come to terms with the death of her four-year-old daughter Zana in the war, is haunted by nocturnal terrors and finds herself unable to have another baby, even though she...