One woman’s war story: Hive, the real-life Sundance hit set on Kosovo’s feminist frontline

Last year's festival saw a hat-trick of awards for a feature telling the true story of Fahrije Hoti, a Kosovan war widow who rebelled against her village patriarchy. Director Blerta Basholli and Hoti talk about bringing it to the screen

On 25 March 1999, everything changed for the small Kosovan village of Krushe e Madhe when Serbian troops moved in and forced the villagers to move out. They were searched for gold and jewellery and herded towards the mosque, where the men were separated from the women. Nearly 250 men and boys were killed or disappeared in what was to become one of the worst massacres of the Kosovo war. Fahrije Hoti's husband was among 64 whose bodies were never found.

Hoti, a handsome and composed woman with neatly cropped grey hair, recalls the terrible days that followed with a chilling clarity, as if every detail of the 15-month war between Kosovo and Serbia-Montenegro were seared into her memory. They told us they had dug a mass grave and were going to execute us all and throw us into it. Everyone was crying and yelling," she tells me on Zoom from her home, a short distance from where it all happened. In the confusion, she became separated from her three-year-old daughter and thought her three-month-old son was dead, after he was seized from her arms and hurled on to a concrete floor. But somehow, all three of them survived, along with her father-in-law, who was too old and frail to be taken off with the younger men.