When I interviewed him, he had been in the house for three months. He’d gone straight from jail to the house. When I left, the brother-in-law says to me privately, “You know, by another interpretation of the Kanun, we shouldn’t owe that other family a life. Their son came onto our land and put us in the dishonorable position of having to defend our land and kill someone on our land. That’s the most dishonorable thing you can do, to kill a guest on your own land. They should owe us a life.” So the notion of responsibility in Albania can, yeah, it can be kind of muddled.

How common are feuds?
When we interviewed the 3,000 kids to do the auditions it didn’t come as any surprise, what we were making a movie about. It might be like doing a movie about drug abuse or something. You could go into a high school and interview all these kids about drug abuse, and it’s not that they or their immediate friends have drug problems, but everyone knows about the issue.

The landscape is shot beautifully, and it really emphasizes the necessity of the land in these people’s livelihoods.
Not many people have gotten to see what Albania looks like, so I wanted to just give people a sense of, like, What is this country like? Under Communism it was completely isolated. The last ten years of Communism, during the eighties, no one went in or out of Albania. That was part of what was fascinating for me, it was this strangely isolated mystery. So part of the interesting curiosity for me is to show Albania, and part of that is the landscape, but part of it is also people in horse-drawn carriages using cell phones.