With Dua, Blerta Basholli and Nicole Borgeat transform a coming-of-age story into a deeply human portrait of adolescence unfolding beneath the shadow of war.
There are films at Cannes that speak about conflict through explosions, history, or political rhetoric. And then there are films that reveal war through the smaller fractures it leaves behind — in homes, in friendships, in the private confusion of growing up while the world around you begins to unravel.
Dua, written by Blerta Basholli and Nicole Borgeat and awarded the SACD Prize at the Critics’ Week during the Cannes Film Festival, belongs firmly to that second category. It is a film that understands something many war narratives forget: history is often experienced first through adolescence.
Set in late-1990s Prishtina as ethnic tensions intensify and the Kosovo conflict approaches, the film follows thirteen-year-old Dua, a girl suspended between childhood and adulthood while the structures around her begin to shift in ways she cannot yet fully comprehend. As violence moves closer and fear becomes part of daily life, her struggle is not only political or social. It is deeply personal. She is trying to understand her changing body, her place among her peers, and the fragile possibility of defining herself before history does it for her.
What makes Dua remarkable is the way it refuses to separate those experiences.
The film does not present adolescence as a pause before political reality, nor does it reduce war to a dramatic backdrop. Instead, Basholli and Borgeat allow both realities to coexist. The emotional turbulence of youth and the growing instability of the outside world move together, gradually becoming impossible to distinguish from one another.
The SACD Prize, awarded to the film’s screenwriters during Critics’ Week, feels especially significant in this context. The distinction recognizes writing that demonstrates both originality and authorial strength, and Dua achieves precisely that through its refusal of simplification. The screenplay never explains more than it needs to. It trusts observation over exposition.
There is a striking clarity in the film’s perspective.
Rather than framing the story through the logic of geopolitical conflict, Basholli and Borgeat remain closely aligned with Dua’s emotional reality. The audience experiences the world not through strategic events or historical analysis, but through shifting relationships, fleeting fears, moments of humiliation, curiosity, desire, and confusion.
This choice gives the film its particular emotional force.
The looming war remains present, but often at the edges of the frame. It exists in whispers, in tensions adults struggle to conceal, in the growing awareness that ordinary routines are beginning to disappear. The result is a portrait of conflict not as spectacle, but as atmosphere — something slowly entering everyday life until it becomes impossible to ignore.
Visually, Dua embraces a restrained and intimate language. Cinematographer Lucie Baudinaud captures Prishtina with a sensitivity that avoids both nostalgia and dramatic stylization. Streets, classrooms, apartments, and public spaces feel lived-in rather than symbolic. The city becomes more than a setting; it becomes an emotional landscape shaped by uncertainty.
What lingers most strongly is the way the film observes young people navigating a reality they did not choose.
Dua’s friendship with Maki — a fearless and rebellious presence who pulls her toward unexpected forms of resistance — becomes one of the film’s emotional anchors. Their bond is not romanticized. It is restless, imperfect, and profoundly necessary. Together they create small spaces of freedom within a world increasingly defined by restriction.
Throughout Critics’ Week, conversations around the film often returned to this balance between personal intimacy and historical weight.
Many films about war focus on survival. Dua focuses on becoming.
The distinction matters.
Because Basholli and Borgeat understand that adolescence itself is a kind of fragile resistance. To continue laughing, dancing, desiring, and imagining a future while everything around you signals collapse is its own act of defiance. The film never romanticizes that resilience, but it recognizes its importance.
This perspective aligns closely with the statement made by the SACD jury, which praised the film for portraying war not through grand narratives but through the overlooked realities of ordinary lives and the gaze of a thirteen-year-old girl who “explains nothing, yet illuminates everything.”
That observation captures the film’s achievement perfectly.
Dua is not interested in providing definitive lessons about history. Instead, it captures the emotional texture of living through a moment when history is arriving but has not yet fully arrived. A period where uncertainty becomes the dominant condition of everyday life.
As the film circulated through Cannes, it became clear that its impact extended beyond its immediate context. Though rooted in Kosovo during the late 1990s, its portrait of adolescence under pressure feels universally recognizable. The fear of losing one’s future before it has begun. The longing for belonging. The instinct to hold onto joy even when circumstances insist otherwise.
These are not exclusively political emotions. They are human ones.
The recognition from Critics’ Week marks another significant chapter in Basholli’s evolving career, confirming her place among the most compelling voices emerging from contemporary Balkan cinema. Yet Dua never feels concerned with its own importance. Its strength lies in its humility — in its attention to moments that larger historical narratives often overlook.
By the time the lights came up after its screenings at the Miramar, the film had left behind a particular kind of silence. Not the silence of shock, but of reflection. The silence that follows a work that has managed to make distant history feel immediate and intimate.
In the end, Dua is not simply a film about war.
It is a film about a girl trying to become herself while the world around her is becoming something else.
And in that fragile intersection between personal awakening and collective collapse, Basholli and Borgeat have created one of the most moving and emotionally precise works to emerge from Cannes this year.