16/10/2024 - The Albanian director shares the sociopolitical inspirations behind his latest film and its complex main character

Waterdrop [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Robert Budina
film profile], the third feature by Albanian filmmaker Robert Budina, tells of a woman who finds herself having to recalibrate her moral compass after her teenage son is accused of sexually assaulting a classmate. Delivering a fierce condemnation of the misogyny embedded within Albanian society as well as a complex disentanglement of love and morality, the film is currently playing in the Warsaw Film Festival’s International Competition.

Cineuropa: Why did you locate the film in this setting of Lake Ohrid, and what does it evoke for you?
Robert Budina: We only had an idea for the story that we wanted to tell, and before writing the script, we went to find the right location. This lake was a perfect fit for what we wanted to show with the inner lives of the characters. It also represents a kind of mythology of the city, as said at the beginning of the film. It's an actual myth from the ancient times of the city that was passed down through folklore. It's like the lake is the conscience of the city, where everything can be hidden, and inside is a monster that preserves those things. It’s also the oldest lake in Europe. This inspired me to go deeper with the script – as deep as the lake is.

What about the symbolism of water that’s present throughout the film and in the title?
I don't know if you are familiar with the Pythagorean cup – if you exceed a certain level with just a drop of water, all of the water spills out of the receptacle. With this metaphor, I wanted to express the fact that a mere drop of water can change everything, like in the life of Aida. But also, there is a saying in Albania that a single drop of water can wash a boy, but the entire sea is not enough to wash a girl. This means that if a girl does something “dirty”, let's say, people will be prejudiced against her, but it's not the same for a boy. I am speaking about ancient times in Albania, when this metaphor was much more universal.

The protagonist, Aida, is a bit of an antihero at the beginning when she actively fights against the victim of the crime by believing her son is innocent.
It's very delicate. Why did we construct her character to be so complex? Some years ago in Albania, there was not only one rape, but different rapes in different cities, where teenagers were assaulted by their classmates. Most of those stories were covered up by the people, the media, the mothers or the rapists. In a way, those feeding masculinity in Albania are also the women. That’s why we want to show how a mother can hide a crime committed by her own son against another woman, and to enter into her conscience through this story.

The second thing is that Albania is a very patriarchal country, but Aida goes against that. She wants to be the centre of the attention. She wants everything until the day her son commits this crime. It's disconnecting her from her own emotional world. We worked on the script for almost three years. We wanted to have something very deep, like a kind of anatomy of our society, but also of the relationship you have with your family, career, society and politics.

Gresa Pallaska does a superb job of bringing Aida to life without alienating the audience.
Casting the film was not so easy, because the role of Aida is very complex. We began the casting in Albania because I wanted to have Albanian actors. But we couldn't find Aida in Albania, so we expanded the casting into Kosovo. They are Albanian-speaking, but it's another dialect there, a northern dialect, and I wanted it to be from Southern Albania. Something magical happened with Gresa. We had four candidates, and I went to Pristina to test two of them, and with her, everything happened like it would in a fairy tale. She captured my very thoughts without even speaking. This was something that had never happened to me before. I was not focused on finding “great actresses”; I wanted to find great people who shared my feelings about the story.

Was there one story in particular that inspired you, or was it an amalgamation of what you had read or known?
To tell you the truth, there was one story in particular. Officials covered it up because they didn't want to show that the city was dirty or had immoral values. The ones who shocked me the most were the politicians who made [the identity of] the victim public. That's why we are not putting the spotlight on the victim, but instead on the rapists.

In my life as an intellectual, let's say, I have been an activist for rights, art and so on, and I have met a lot of people in power who are one thing in public, while in private, they are totally different. I have seen that inside of them, they have myriad human crises. I thought, “These people can live with a clean conscience when they do these kinds of things.” That’s why I wanted to explore this character that wields power, as sometimes, people like this hurt people with their power. I wanted to see their moral conscience and the drama it creates.