SWORN VIRGIN

By Laura BISPURI

FEATURETTE - as BUYER REP

Drama - Production 2014

Sworn Virgin is a journey inside femininity told in its complexity and contradictory forms.

    • Year of production
    • 2014
    • Genres
    • Drama
    • Countries
    • ITALY, SWITZERLAND, ALBANIA, GERMANY
    • Director(s)
    • Laura BISPURI
    • Synopsis
    • Hana Doda, still a girl, escapes from her destiny of being a wife and a servant, a future imposed on women in the inhospitable mountains of Albania. She appeals to the old law of the Kanun and takes an oath of eternal virginity, becoming, in this way, a “sworn virgin.” She turns into a man, takes up a rifle and becomes Mark, Mark Doda. In exchange for this sacrifice, Hana is considered at the same level of the other men of the village. Her battle does not only mean that she must rebel against what destiny has been writing on her body for centuries, but she must also reject, in the name of her choice, every form of love. A decision that becomes her prison.
      After more than ten years spent in the solitude of the mountains as a man, she becomes though and she changes her character to deal with the hardship, the cold and misery of life, until something happens that awakens her again…
      Hana decides to change her life and painstakingly regain her body. She knows that leaving the mountains is the price she has to pay to be able to go back to living.
      She leaves her arid land beginning a journey through which she will revisit her past and exhume memories and feelings that she had been forced to bury in oblivion.
      Following a path that is a continuous and subtle crossing of two different and distant worlds, that of the past and that of the future.
      In the modern city of Milan, she struggles to leave behind her man’s clothes and she learns to be a woman again. She experiences the heady feeling of physical contact with other people, she finds dear and beloved people that life had taken away from her, and she opens herself to an unexpected and forbidden possibility of love. Mark not only returns to being Hana, but she is also able to piece back together the two souls that, for years, have lived inside her body.She is reborn as a new, free and complete creature.