That’s interesting, because I felt while I was watching it that the parents were non-entities in the family dynamic.
It really became a story at its most universal about each of these two kids growing up, and each of them finding their voice and their place – both in the family but more specifically in the world. For the boy it’s about trying to fight and push back against this feud, and for the girl it’s about trying to figure out what it means to be a girl in a very patriarchal society, going around town selling bread and cigarettes when girls normally would never go hanging out around town. All the girls that I spoke to who were teenage would say that as soon as school’s over, they’d just go home. All they can do is go to school and back again – if they’re even allowed to go to school.

The question of who takes responsibility within the family turns out to be really muddled. Is that true of a lot of blood feuds?
Sometimes. The reason why it becomes muddled here is because I was interested in telling it really from the son’s point of view. Since he wasn’t there, we don’t see [the murder]. What I was trying to go for, what is common in Albania, is that everyone’s got a justification for what they do. So that even if it’s clear who actually pulled a trigger or plunged a knife, the notion of responsibility is still kind of gray and muddled. I interviewed a family that owed a life because the father had heard a noise outside his house and found a man clinging to the window. The way he told the story was this guy jumped on him, the gun went off, the guy was killed. He said, “I immediately put down my gun, I turned myself in,” and he spent two years in jail.