In Skopje’s Gazi Baba neighbourhood, 14-year-old Sadije fights to keep her family afloat as the future head of the house. An Albanian girl raised as a son as a modern ‘sworn virgin’, she trains on an all-boys team and becomes the country’s wrestling state champion. The only Albanian girl on the Macedonian national wrestling team, she wears the flag of a country whose language she doesn’t speak. When her coach quits and she loses her title, the foundation of her identity and her family’s hopes begins to crumble. Renaming herself Satko (a boy’s name), she starts to evolve from reluctant champion to emerging matriarch. Big in Gazi Baba is an intimate, yet haunting, three-year observational film about a young woman standing at the crossroads between the son she was expected to be and the woman she dares to become, forging a new kind of belonging that holds her fractured community together through the radical act of care.
Participant: Pauline Blanchet