Patriarchy and women figuratively kept in cages are topics that Lorin Terizi has been tackling since his short films. In Tirana 100, after the death of the rich man who was maintaining her, his mistress, abandoned by everyone, is forced to leave the capital and go back to her village. In News, after a body is discovered in an Albanian village, a woman is the first to speak about it on TV, but then the men step in and reinterpret the truth entirely. And while the latter short film was a rather grotesque comedy on ordinary foolishness, Terizi’s first feature, Agia, which just celebrated its world premiere in the 1-2 Competition of the Warsaw Film Festival, is a serious, heavy drama about archaic rules and values clashing with modernity, resulting in a tragedy.

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The story is set against the backdrop of Albania casting off its totalitarian regime and opening up to the world, in the early 1990s. Young Agia (Kosovare Krasniqi) lives with her two brothers in a remote village, where she is kept busy with housework and forced to get engaged to a man who soon leaves for Greece in search of a livelihood, leaving her behind to wait for his return. Although she is closer to her younger brother, Gjon (Lurni Krasniqi), more sensitive than the elder (which is made obvious in a scene where he cannot bring himself to slaughter a chicken), he is more of a guardian than a soulmate, while the other,  Mark (Afrim Muçaj), who has all the authority as head of the household, also works in Greece. Despite being forbidden from learning the family trade of handcrafting felt wool hats, Agia manages to master it on her own and helps Gjon get better at it. At an arts gathering funded with Italian money where she clearly sees how foreigners regard them as exotic animals, she meets Mario (Lulzim Zeqja), an older, charismatic man who has, needless to say, a pregnant wife. While he pretends to read her soul and promises to open a whole new world for her, he is mostly intent on possessing her body, which will inevitably stir the brothers’ tribal sense of violated honour and thirst for revenge, setting the stage for an inevitable tragic ending.

Despite the signs of a turbulent time of political change dropped here and there in the film – such as crowds of people on TV and American flags appearing even in rural areas –, the story remains encapsulated in its own internal dynamics, leaving the bigger picture to serve as mere decoration and leaning more towards mundane sentimentality. Neither does Guillaume le Grontec’s contemplative camera staring at Kosovare Krasniqi’s face reveal Agia’s inner world beyond the surface, nor do the outdated values of her brothers tell us anything new about the collision between tradition and emancipation. The lack of a more comprehensive cultural context that might tie the topic to our present time isolates the plot in its own microworld, leaving it in the realm of ethnographic curiosity instead of building up a narrative with a more universal scope. Sadly, in the absence of broader contextualization, foreigners might indeed see exotic animals instead of full-blooded characters.

Agia was produced by Tunnelfilm and On Film (Albania), in co-production with Artikulacija (Montenegro) and Elly Films (Austria).