FORGIVENESS OF BLOOD/BD

American director Joshua Marston broke out in 2004 with his jolting, Oscar-nominated MARIA FULL OF GRACE, about a young Colombian woman working as a drug mule. In his remarkable follow-up, THE FORGIVENESS OF BLOOD, he turns his camera on another corner of the world: contemporary northern Albania, a place still troubled by the ancient custom of interfamilial blood feuds. From this reality, Marston sculpts a fictional narrative about a teenage brother and sister physically and emotionally trapped in a cycle of violence, a result of their father's entanglement with a rival clan over a piece of land. THE FORGIVENESS OF BLOOD is a tense and perceptive depiction of a place where tradition and progress have an uneasy coexistence, as well as a dynamic coming-of-age drama.