Entertainment - Kosovo to Cannes: Arta Dobroshi's Journey to The Silence of Lorna - by Stephanie Kirchner
"Welcome to Pristina, have a nice day," the border policeman greets Arta Dobroshi as she arrives at the airport of Kosovo's capital. What would seem like a simple polite gesture to most, still strikes the Kosovo Albanian actress as odd. She had grown up in Pristina during the country's fight for independence in the '90s, when Serbian Security Forces carried out a campaign of repression and violence against Kosovo's ethnic Albanians. And while the violence is over, the memories are still painfully fresh. "Not long ago, I used to live in constant fear of the police," she says. "You would be scared that they'd see your passport and you'd get beaten. "
That's one reason why Dobroshi is so convincing in the role of Lorna, a young Albanian woman who dreams of opening a snack bar in Belgium with her boyfriend and agrees to a sinister plan: she is to marries Claudy, a junkie, for citizenship, kill him, then marry a Russian gangster who will pay richly for a Belgian passport. But the scheme falls apart when Lorna starts to fall for Claudy. The Silence of Lorna, which opens in the U.S. in July, is as much a love story as it is a thriller, and — being a Dardenne film — it has a good dose of social criticism, too.
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