By Robert St. Martin
Waterdrop (Pikë Uji) directed by Robert Budina, was Albania’s Oscar entry in 2025 and included in the lineup of films at this year’s SEEfest Film Festival. Waterdrop is a study in how nice boys turn into monstrous men. This third feature film by independent Albanian filmmaker and producer Robert Budina was inspired by a 2019 news story. Budina directed and penned this story of corruption, complicity and silence within a patriarchal system through the eyes of Aida (Gresa Pallaska), a tough businesswoman living in an Albanian town on the shores of Lake Ohrid. Aida works a lucrative job as a city planner for the allocation of EU subsidies. While a large portion of these funds are pocketed by her corrupt boss, Aida isn’t above taking the occasional bribe herself to keep her place in this ultra-masculine, patriarchal world.
Her comfortable life is shattered, however, when her teenage son Marku (Paolo Iancu) gets accused of sexual assault by a classmate named Denis. Convinced of her son’s innocence, Aida starts to investigate on her own, against the wishes of her husband and the police. In a world where corruption runs rampant, only money – not truth, let alone justice – reigns supreme. In Waterdrop, Aida, with her powerful position at city hall thinks herself equally above the law. But she finds out in real time how such a system depends on the kind of latent if not outright violent misogyny she’s convinced herself she exists outside of, when she is really its most obvious example.
Aida (a standout Gresa Pallaska) is a woman in charge, a woman whose pride in her own privilege and power makes her immune to imagining a world where she doesn’t get her way. In her work, she’s used to charming (and sometimes bribing) foreign investors to do her bidding, to sign the many building contracts that allow her and her husband Ilir (Arben Bajraktaraj) to live a moneyed, carefree life in the small town they’ve made their home.
A fixer who can walk into any room she pleases – board rooms, police headquarters, even her bedroom – and get what she wants on her own terms, Aida is not a warm presence, yet she’s clearly leveraged (or perhaps even developed) that hardened exterior in order to be so successful.
One morning, Aida’s world is turned upside down when her teenage son Marku (Paolo Iancu) is taken into custody, having been accused of raping a young girl. According to her testimony, the young girl was lured to a villa rented in Marku’s name where she was eventually tied down (with a bag over her head) and repeatedly assaulted. Awash in the world of accounts owed and settled, on petty rivalries and brokered alliances, Aida immediately assumes foul play: Someone must be framing him in hopes of icing her and Ilir out from the lucrative deal they’ve just signed.
“He’s just a kid. How can a kid do something so ghastly?” she asks herself. It’s easier for her to understand this turn of events as an extension of the corrupt world in which she moves so freely. But as more details begin to emerge, and as her husband and the powerful men he enlists to help clear Marku begin to sideline her more and more, Aida is left to wonder how complicit she is or can let herself become if she is to put her son first, ahead of everything – including, pointedly, the actual truth.
Budina, who co-wrote the film with Ajola Daja and Doruntina Basha, doesn’t make Mark’s innocence (or his guilt, for that matter), the central concern of the film. Waterdrop doesn’t unfold like a police procedural, nor like a he-said, she-said drama, though it borrows elements from such narrative frames. Instead, this is a story about how a system creates the very circumstances that allow Marku and Denis to approach what they did with the nonchalance of the privileged. This engrossing film works as a modern fable about corruption, masculinity, impunity and the way towns and countries and families alike find it hard to disentangle the way those three forces complement and reinforce one another.
