Astrit Kabashi and Flonja Kodheli attend the “Shame and Money” premiere during the 2026 Sundance Film Festival at the Library Center Theatre on January 25, 2026, in Park City, Utah. (Photo by Dia Dipasupil/Getty Images)

By Cecilia Santini

“Shame is a luxury,” a woman tells her wealthy sister in Shame and Money, director Visar Morina’s second feature to premiere at the Sundance Film Festival after Exil in 2020.

In this social realist drama, screening in the 2026 Festival’s World Cinema Dramatic Competition, Hatixhe (Flonja Kodheli) and Shaban (Astrit Kabashi) are dairy farmers living with their three daughters and Shaban’s mother (Kumrije Hoxha) in a small village in Kosovo. Money is already scarce, but the sudden loss of their cows forces the family to move to the city to look for work. 

Hatixhe’s wealthy brother-in-law (Alban Ukaj) hires the couple to clean his restaurant part-time, but other work is hard to find, housing is expensive, and the family struggles, while Hatixhe and Shaban grapple with the tension between necessity and dignity. Hatixhe is more pragmatic, willing to accept money and work from her sister (Fiona Gllavica) despite the possible humiliations attached, but Shaban hesitates. He doesn’t want to compromise his pride to put food on the table, resisting what feels to him like pity, charity, or servitude.

“I need for myself to break down what the film is about, and I felt it was very much about dignity and what it means to be some kind of a human being when the only thing that really counts is money,” Morina says after the film’s premiere at the Library Center Theatre on January 25. “The most important thing was to treat everything we see with dignity.” 

The movie asks how someone can maintain a sense of self-worth when they can’t provide for themselves or the people they love, when they have to labor for other people. Shaban acutely feels the occasionally thin line between generosity and condescension. His lack of agency over his own life leads him to feel invisible, which has tragic consequences. 

“While we were writing and also before writing, we were thinking a lot about violence and violence you don’t see, violence you get through structures, a system,” Morina explains. “If you think about this, for example … people who have really very shitty jobs, if you think in this term then you think actually humans are more peaceful than you would think. … All this pressure and all this violence that happens to you, somehow it needs to get out.”

The film is a searing look at inequality and precarity, tragically relevant as the cost of living is rising around the world. “[I went to] this gated community,” Morina says. “I went to the guys who do [the yard work Shaban does] and I asked them, ‘Where is the bathroom here?’ And then they told me there is no bathroom. And we are talking about an area that probably makes 500 million.”

Visual hints gesture to the weight of recent politics and history. “When we talk about things, we don’t put things in context. Some shit happens today and 20 years later we see what it actually meant,” Morina explains after giving the audience a quick sketch of the wars in the region in the 1990s. “I felt it’s important to bring this time and this period to it.”

Making the movie was a lengthy process and a labor of love. “It was meant to be a very fast film, cheap and fast; it took five years. It was actually quite hard to get it done,” Morina says. Kabashi continues, “This is my fourth movie working with Visar. Every time with him is something special. I think he’s extraordinary. This role, this film was a hard task, but we did it, and we did it together. We discussed and talked too much about this script all the time for four or five years.”

Intimate handheld camerawork grounds the movie in a reality that feels crushing and inescapable. “We didn’t want to have beauty shots or anything, it was more important to come as close as it gets to some kind of reality,” Morina says about the movie’s style. “We did very little production design, and we were very much trying to see actually only the performance.”

Those performances are understated, honest, and powerful, giving the characters depth and humanity. “We just discovered the film tonight at the same time as you,” Kodheli tells the audience. “So I’m very emotional right now. But what I can say about our work, we had a very long process of rehearsals, so it really helped to get to know each other, Astrit and me, and to get to be closer and closer. The approach was very different from what I’ve done before.”