Cinema across the former Yugoslavia has the potential to serve as a pivotal space for the culture of remembrance

photo: Unsplash / Illustration

The broadcast on Croatian Radiotelevision (HRT) of the documentary film The Peacemaker (Mirotvorac) – dedicated to the efforts of Osijek police chief Josip Reihl-Kir to de-escalate tensions in eastern Croatia during the volatile early summer of 1991, for which he was assassinated, sparking the full-scale outbreak of war – provoked a flurry of reactions. Instead of focusing on one man’s courage and his attempt to achieve something extraordinary, instead of sparking debates on the atrocities committed by our own people in our name, and instead of highlighting the crucial importance of films that confront the truth about war crimes… what followed was a backlash from a section of the disgruntled public, targeting the filmmakers themselves: journalists Drago Hedl and Hrvoje Zovko on social media and web portals.

Similar reactions have been triggered elsewhere across the region by other films, including narrative features. This underscores the need to re-examine the extent to which cinema has aided the process of dealing with the past, and how the media has facilitated or hindered this effort. Ultimately, it poses an unavoidable question: how much can films dealing with wartime trauma – along with their media portrayal and, above all, media support – contribute to catharsis, reconciliation, and the easing of systemic tensions?

On this occasion, Mediacentar Sarajevo and Pro Peace in Bosnia and Herzegovina set out to demonstrate that cinema in the post-Yugoslav space can serve as a vital battleground for the culture of remembrance and for confronting a painful wartime past. By the same token, films frequently face media blackout, outright censorship, political instrumentalization, revisionist narratives, and the deliberate suppression of uncomfortable truths. For the purposes of this article, this article analyses films such as Blerta Basholli’s Hive (Zgjoi), Jasmila Žbanić’s Quo Vadis, Aida?, Michael Winterbottom’s Welcome to Sarajevo, Lordan Zafranović’s Golden Cut '42 – Children of Kozara (Zlatni rez ’42 – Djeca Kozare), and Ognjen Glavonić’s The Load (Teret), alongside several other key works.

SERBIA

What the Media Does to Films About War Crimes – and What That Tells Us

When it was announced that Lordan Zafranović’s film Golden Cut '42 – Children of Kozara (Zlatni rez ’42 – Djeca Kozare) would open the 53rd FEST in Belgrade, news outlets widely reported that the Croatian actors starring in the film would boycott the premiere due to threats from far-right extremists. One of the lead actors, Rene Bitorajac, explicitly denied receiving threats, pointing instead to a far more telling issue: Croatian actors, he explained, “do not want to take part in political propaganda for which the film is clearly set to be weaponized, judging by numerous announcements.”

Thus, even before Zafranović’s film had been screened for the Belgrade audience, public discussion had already shifted away from its artistic content. Instead of exploring what the film reveals about Jasenovac [a WWII concentration and extermination camp in Croatia, run by the fascist regime, where hundreds of thousands of Serbs, Jews, Roma, and anti-fascists were killed], how it portrays the suffering of the children of Kozara, or what its creators sought to convey, the discussion quickly shifted toward by its potential political utility, the media backlash, and the ways it might be co-opted in the public sphere. The film became a political event before it ever had the chance to be a cinematic one.

This distinction is far from trivial. A film may depict a specific historical event, yet the public mechanics operating around it often follow an entirely different logic. It can be met with silence, marginalized, reduced to a brief festival line-up item, or, conversely, inflated into a symbol – a catalyst for political conflict and a tool to reinforce pre-existing biases. In this process, the media does not necessarily define what a film is, but it profoundly dictates where the public encounters it, in what framing, and burdened with what pre-packaged meaning.

Bitorajac did not state that the film itself was propaganda; he stressed that it would be used as propaganda. This distinction – between what a film genuinely is and what it is turned into – provides a vital key to understanding the Serbian media ecosystem when confronted with works that address the country's wartime past.

Sometimes the issue is not that a film attracts excessive controversy, but that another fails to gain any traction at all. While one title is turned into political headlines before audiences can even buy a ticket, another may secure international acclaim, premiere at major global festivals, and raise pressing questions about accountability for war crimes, only to slip through the domestic public space virtually unnoticed.

Such was precisely the case with Ognjen Glavonić’s The Load.

The Full Weight of 'The Load'

When The Load entered the official competition at the Cannes Film Festival in 2018, its coverage in Serbian mainstream media was sparse and purely transactional. A film that speaks, with almost oppressive restraint, about the transport of hidden corpses from Kosovo in 1999 – confronting responsibility of Serbian army not through graphic sensationalism, but through silence and a darkness no one dares to name – received a level of international acclaim rarely granted to domestic cinema. Yet at home in Serbia, it was met with quiet indifference.

It was not that the film was invisible. It existed – on the festival circuit, in cultural columns, and among the niche audiences actively seeking out such cinema. However, between festival visibility and a meaningful national debate lies a vast void that speaks volumes.

Idro Seferi, a Kosovo-born journalist and documentary maker based in Belgrade for years, recognizes this vacuum as a broader regional pattern.

“Most of these films, which are perhaps better received across the wider region, are usually confined to festival screenings or shown without much fanfare on television here and there, and then those subjects are closed as quickly as possible.”

War, Seferi notes, “is endlessly prolonged through cinema – whether via documentaries or TV broadcasts – which further fuels the spread of propaganda and various fabrications.”

Serbia boasts reputable film festivals that have spent years programming works on the 1990s wars, such as Free Zone, the Festival of Auteur Film, and Beldocs. Yet, as Jasmina Lazović, executive director of the Humanitarian Law Center, points out, this space operates within rigid boundaries.

“Such content primarily reaches an audience that is already invested in these topics.”

The core problem lies elsewhere.

“These films rarely secure commercial theatrical distribution, which is precisely the avenue needed to reach a broader public that doesn't typically follow these issues,” says Lazović.

A similar pattern applies to the press: movies dealing with war crimes are almost exclusively covered by outlets already dedicated to dealing with the past. “It is hard to imagine, for instance, Ognjen Glavonić being invited onto pro-regime outlets to discuss The Load with a mainstream audience,” she adds.

In this sense, The Load remains a textbook case – a film tackling one of the heaviest chapters of modern Serbian history that remained confined to a space that had already made up its mind. Seferi captures this reality succinctly: “Serbia has produced some extraordinary films on these topics, but I believe the vast majority of people have never even heard of them.”

When Popular Culture Serves as a Tool for Revisionism

A lack of media endorsement is only part of the equation. Lazović highlights another layer of the problem: the deep-seated hesitation among commercial actors to engage with subjects still treated as toxic or sensitive within Serbian society.

“It isn't merely a matter of distributors calculating that these films lack commercial appeal; it stems from an unwillingness to open up a dialogue that might expose them to divergent and potentially hostile public reactions,” she explains.

By contrast, popular culture projects that reinforce rather than challenge dominant wartime narratives find an easy path to mainstream audiences. Lazović cites titles like Dara of Jasenovac and Dara of Jasenovac's counterpart Storm as prime examples where pop culture is deployed as an instrument of revisionism or nationalistic consolidation.

Seferi frames this as a deliberate political strategy: “It is paramount for political elites to control this mechanism – defining what constitutes 'truth' versus 'lies', or acknowledgment versus denial – because there is no genuine commitment in Serbia, or indeed much of the region, to truly confront the fallout of the war.”

The controversy surrounding Golden Cut '42 in the days leading up to its Belgrade premiere illustrates this logic from a different angle. A film about Jasenovac – a subject that does not pertain to war crimes of Serbian army of the 1990s yet forms part of the same network of unaddressed history – is dragged into the political arena before the public can even view it. Actors are forced to take public stances, media outlets magnify alleged threats, and the surrounding controversy eclipses the artwork itself. The phenomenon Bitorajac described – the political hijack of a film independent of its creators – is a familiar playbook for how cinema enters the public domain.

“Media visibility can make a critical difference,” Lazović concludes, “because it is only through broader public discourse that a film can transcend the festival bubble and become part of a genuine societal reckoning with the past and the question of responsibility.”

Yet such a public dialogue requires a media landscape willing to facilitate it, rather than transforming it into a battleground before the house lights even go down.

The problem, therefore, is not merely that certain films suffer from insufficient distribution. It lies in the structural hierarchy of public visibility: one set of films remains locked inside comfortable spaces for the already converted, while another is elevated into a public spectacle simply because it can be easily weaponized to serve existing political agendas. In both cases, the context in which the public encounters the film is pre-determined long before the opening credits roll.

[At the end of this part of the story, Zafranović’s work was named the best Serbian film at FEST, and the jury described it as “a colossal and honourably crafted dramatic work that rounds off the author’s powerful creative oeuvre, thematically and steadfastly devoted to examining the anatomy of evil.”]

BOSNIA AND HERZEGOVINA

Welcome to Trauma: Between Reality and Fiction

The 1990s wars across the former Yugoslavia did not merely fracture a single cinematography into seven distinct pieces; they left each successor state with a legacy to curate and construct according to its own capacities and political imperatives. Films dealing with war or post-war themes flooded post-Yugoslav screens to such an extent that, at times, it felt as though a new war was being waged – a cinematic one. Yet, while the old proverb insists that “a picture is worth a thousand words”, it by no means guarantees that the picture tells the truth. Thus, while cinema on the one hand strove to capture an artistic representation of historical truth and social justice, it also frequently contributed to the relativization and politization of the most serious crimes, further postponing any sense of collective catharsis or reconciliation.

The past decade of Bosnian Herzegovinian cinema has undeniably been defined by Jasmila Žbanić’s Quo Vadis, Aida? (2020). This film demonstrates that what ultimately endures is an artwork's aesthetic achievement – the auteur’s distinct cinematic voice, the rigor of its form, and the core idea that emerges from that synergy. Quo Vadis, Aida? stands secured in film history as a work of singular artistic courage and resolve, offering a remarkably subtle yet meticulous examination of a devastating subject. The character of Aida takes her rightful place in cinema history as a classical tragic heroine, given shape through the performance of Jasna Đuričić – a seamless mimesis of ethical gravity and restrained pathos.

Naturally, given that it confronts an intensely politicized historical event – despite being a legally established genocide against Bosniaks in Srebrenica – Aida was forcibly dragged into the region's political mire, culminating in outright screening bans across Republic of Serbia and the Republika Srpska entity. Yet, within that toxic landscape, Aida's story could not be erased; for while cinema can defeat politics, politics can never truly destroy a great film.

Ignoring the Trauma

Concurrently, Western cinema – and Hollywood in particular – embarked on its own search for a superficial “truth”, packaged neatly as entertainment, which ultimately satisfied no one in the region. Among the films depicting the 1990s Yugoslav wars, Michael Winterbottom’s Welcome to Sarajevo (1997) holds a unique position as the sole major Hollywood production focused on the Siege of Sarajevo. Re-examining its “footage” of the siege feels perhaps more urgent today than ever.

Welcome to Sarajevo was widely criticized for relying on narrative clichés, distorting historical realities, and exploiting a human tragedy. The film was adapted from the autobiographical book by British TV reporter Michael Nicholson, who documented his time in the besieged, bombarded city and his semi-legal adoption and smuggling of a young Bosnian girl to safety in the UK.

In her book Cinema of Flames, film scholar Dina Iordanova captures the disdain expressed by foreign war correspondents stationed in Sarajevo during the siege. The prevailing negative consensus among film critics found justification in the righteous fury of those who had endured the worst of the siege: “Where were these filmmakers in 1993, when Sarajevans (citizens of Sarajevo) actually needed them?” or “Do you have any idea how much food nine million dollars [the budget of Welcome to Sarajevo] could have bought?”

Iordanova arrives at a damning conclusion: “Welcome to Sarajevo failed because its creators reacted too late to craft a politically correct film about a war they fundamentally did not care about. The ultimate verdict is that the film arrived when it no longer mattered. It was made by people for whom Sarajevo held no personal meaning. For them, Sarajevo was simply another project – one that, even if it failed artistically, served its purpose as a prestigious line on its creators' résumés.”

Supporting this critique, screenwriter Frank Cottrell Boyce admitted his initial ignorance about Bosnia and Herzegovina: “Yet I knew one crucial fact – that this war was being ignored. I knew it because I was ignoring it myself.”

This admission, however, holds deeper implications for how the film can be interpreted. It suggests that the story of the journalist and the orphan might serve as a framing device to interrogate the very nature of media representation. What if Winterbottom was fully conscious of this indifference, and his film was in fact an intervention against it? Viewed through this lens, Cottrell Boyce’s statement takes on a different weight: the problem of representation becomes, for Winterbottom, an inherently political question. It represents a deliberate attempt by the director to probe why he himself had tuned out the siege of Sarajevo as both a subject and a real trauma. Seen this way, Welcome to Sarajevo is not fundamentally a film about Sarajevo at all, but a film about the West’s decision to look away. Media representation of reality is elevated into art, while the film functions as a news report ready for broadcast.

Trauma, Politics, and Cinema

Winterbottom constructs the film as a collage of narrative fiction and documentary/archival footage. Its form is defined as an inseparable hybrid: fiction (the dramatized sequences) acts as the lens – the news camera – through which we encounter reality and raw trauma. This trauma is itself partially staged; for instance, the actual footage of the Markale market massacre is spliced with a dramatized insert featuring Bosnian actress Ines Fančović. Serving as connective tissue between these two realms are authentic archival clips of the war, diplomatic negotiations, and soundbites from politicians. Among the most infamous is the remark made by British diplomat David Owen to the citizens of Sarajevo: “Don’t dream dreams!”

This underscores that between trauma and its media representation stands politics, which fundamentally dictates the film's structural form. The thesis that media representation is an inherently political issue is further reinforced by the film’s mise-en-scène, which strips away all idealization or utopian romance. Every location is explicitly named, often highlighting transit points. The interiors consist mostly of dim corridors and lobbies where daylight barely pierces through plastic UNHCR window sheeting – transitional spaces that lead nowhere.

Furthermore, Winterbottom directly confronts the political indifference surrounding the war. In one key scene, Flynn, an American journalist played by Woody Harrelson (the film’s sole marquee Hollywood star), launches a verbal assault on a fictional NATO representative at Sarajevo airport who claims that “Bosnia is currently not our top priority”, to which Flynn snaps back: “Who is number one then, California?”

Through this confrontation, Winterbottom asserts that the media's portrayal of the war in Bosnia cannot be separated from the West’s refusal to address it as a political crisis. Welcome to Sarajevo thus stands as a vivid illustration of what Fredric Jameson termed the “ideology of form” – where the structural design of an artwork functions as its primary content. In other words, Winterbottom does not blend narrative drama and documentary footage simply to tell a Hollywood story about Henderson and Emira; rather, he leverages the Hollywood narrative format to blur formal boundaries, producing a more accessible critique of an atrocity that the world chose to ignore for years. Had the film relied solely on dramatic re-enactments, it would have been an exercise in tragedy exploitation designed to generate box-office revenue.

That exploitative route was taken by subsequent Hollywood productions touching on the Bosnian War – most notably Angelina Jolie’s In the Land of Blood and Honey. Directed by filmmakers with little connection to Bosnia, these films relied on harrowing depictions of rape and murder to generate dramatic tension for commercial appeal. Welcome to Sarajevo, by contrast, presents a starkly drawn media postcard from hell (“Welcome to Sarajevo” serving as a metaphor for “Welcome to Hell”), addressed to an audience that conceives of hell as a place of fire, blood, and suffering – which is precisely what trauma is.

Freezing the Frame, Stopping the Tape

Yet even in hell, movies get made – films born out of lived trauma and shaped, inevitably, by politics. Jasmila Žbanić’s war drama Quo Vadis, Aida? was originally intended to be an adaptation of Hasan Nuhanović’s book Under the UN Flag: The International Community and the Srebrenica Genocide. Nuhanović had survived the genocide while working as a UN translator. However, creative differences over the script led Žbanić to craft an entirely original narrative centered on Aida (Jasna Đuričić), a fictional English schoolteacher in Srebrenica. Though fictional, Aida’s fate mirrors the lives of the surviving women, mothers, sisters, and daughters of Srebrenica, to whom the film is dedicated.

Indeed, this narrative had to be told through a female lens. The tragedy of Srebrenica carries a female legacy: it is the women who continue to live with its consequences, and who, as survivors, have carried on the fight for justice on behalf of their murdered husbands, sons, fathers, and brothers.

The plot of Quo Vadis, Aida? – where the protagonist looks directly into the camera lens as her fellow citizens are forcibly led away – opens on the eve of July 11, 1995, introducing a family of four in Srebrenica. Although built around the fictional story of Aida’s desperate bid to save her family, Žbanić anchors the opening in documentary reality with the actual radio audio of journalist Nino Ćatić’s final broadcast from Srebrenica. As he desperately appeals to the world with the words “Srebrenica is turning into a slaughterhouse”, the recording establishes the events that follow not merely as cinema, but as testimony and evidence.

Yet Žbanić’s intent is not a literal documentary reconstruction of history. That becomes clear from the title itself, which, echoing Claude Lanzmann's documentary masterpiece Shoah (Hebrew for “catastrophe” or “horror”), frames the Srebrenica genocide within a biblical context. In Žbanić’s film, the Latin question Quo vadis? (Where are you going?) carries a metaphorical warning about the misplaced path Aida chooses her blind trust in the UNPROFOR forces, to whom she entrusts her husband and sons, only for the UN to ultimately abandon her family and 30,000 other civilians to their fate.

In Aida, the genocide unfolds through subtle details, lingering glances, and echoing silences. It begins when a teenage girl is torn from her mother in a surging crowd; it continues on the smirk of a soldier hauling away a weeping young woman as a trophy; it hangs in the silent, recognized gaze between former classmates – a terrified Bosniak woman and a Serb soldier; it is prefigured in Aida’s brief exchange with a former student who is now her oppressor; and it echoes in the faint cries of “Mom!” reverberating through the walls of an empty apartment.

This perpetual, unresolved grief is etched onto the faces of Nihad, Hamdija, and Sejo as they embrace in a circle inside the local school gym, awaiting execution, uncertain if this is their final goodbye. The tragic reality peaks in the subsequent wide shot of the courtyard, where the burst of automatic gunfire from inside the hall abruptly cuts through the background noise of Serb children playing outside.

The act of execution itself is never explicitly shown. Nihad, Hamdija, and Sejo see only the barrels of Kalashnikovs thrust through tiny high windows, the muzzle flashes flickering like the light of a movie projector. Žbanić deliberately refrains from visual monsters on screen; instead, she creates an evocative space where viewers must process the horror themselves, emotionally and intellectually – just as they must ultimately decide whether to utter or suppress the word “genocide”.

Ultimately, Quo Vadis, Aida? is not simply a film about genocide – just as no great work of cinema can be reduced to its raw subject matter. Žbanić distils the historical catastrophe of Srebrenica into an intimate, deeply personal, and feminist portrait of a shattered family. By steering clear of nationalist bravado or cheap sentimentality, she merges cinematic art with socio-historical engagement. The film refrains from heavy-handed judgment, leaving room for the audience to arrive at their own emotional and moral reckonings.

What Jasmila Žbanić seeks to achieve as an auteur is to suspend time: to capture a fleeting moment of pre-war joy, to slow down the relentless march toward July 11, and to freeze the film reel for one last embrace between a father and his sons. Yet for Aida, time stops only in the final frame – as she stands to one side watching the laughter of a new generation of children, while hearing the ghost echoes of her lost sons calling out: “Mom, mom, mom...”

At that moment, the film reel finally comes to a halt.

KOSOVO

A Powerful Testimony of Pain and Resilience Among Women in Post-War Society

The film Hive (Zgjoi), inspired by the true story of Fahrije Hoti, a woman from Krusha e Madhe [a village in western Kosovo] who, while searching for her husband who disappeared during the war, starts an agricultural business, remains one of the most emblematic films about loss, trauma, and redemption.

With her husband gone and no source of income, Fahrije (Yllka Gashi) must provide for her children and her ailing father-in-law. The honey she collects from the hives her husband made isn’t selling, so she decides to add ajvar (pepper sauce) to her stock.

The entire village clings to the hope that life will somehow return to the way it was before. Mentally, the war is not over; its consequences will continue to be felt for a long time.

Twelve members of her husband’s family died in the Krusha e Madhe massacre on March 24, 1999, along with 231 other civilians, men and boys.  Some of their bodies were found in the river, while others remain missing, including Fahrije’s husband.

Together with several other women, Fahrije establishes a small enterprise, an initiative that begins to create cracks in the village’s deeply rooted patriarchal structure. The young mother dares to look ahead, something she could hardly have imagined before.

The characters who resist Fahrije are products of a society and the traumas of historical change in a turbulent region of former Yugoslavia.

Perhaps most disturbing is the paradox of how men respond to the social changes imposed by the war. This is expressed through the insults some men direct at the widows in the street, or through the brick that smashes the rear window of Fahrije’s car.

A powerful chronicle of murders, disappearances, and traumas

The past weighs heavily on Hive, a powerful chronicle of murder, disappearances, burnings, and trauma, but also of courage, reflecting the realities of post-war Kosovo through one woman’s struggle.

 “The more time passes, the more I realize that Hive is not just a film about war, but about what happens after the war ends,” says director Blerta Basholli.

The war has left devastating consequences in the lives of hundreds of thousands of people in Kosovo, and its effects continue to live on in people’s bodies, memories, and relationships.

Years later, what endures is the film’s feminist dimension and its portrayal of long-term trauma and pain, which still seem deeply relevant today.

“I did not start Hive as a manifesto, but as the story of a woman who seeks to live with dignity,” says Basholli.

A film about memory of the past and resilience

Although deeply rooted in Kosovo, the film speaks to universal experiences of loss, dignity, and hope, capturing the struggle of women left to confront the uncertainty and pain of missing loved ones after conflict.

 “The film is a testament to the memory of the past and resilience,” said Kosovo producer Valon Bajgora.

Korab Krasniqi, a transitional justice researcher and project manager at Pro Peace Kosovo, said cinema grounded in sound research and ethical engagement with survivors can provide a credible platform for agency, voice, and participation in struggles over narrative and memory.

 “Such work can contribute to recognition and a sense of justice while creating space to articulate experiences and truths that have been silenced or marginalised,” he said.

“This is particularly important where dominant war narratives are triumphalist, exclusive and shaped by political agendas. Films can offer counternarratives and humanise experiences.  Basholli’s Hive is a strong example of this potential,” Krasniqi added.

In Hive, even the smallest gestures have a powerful effect on the viewer. Yllka Gashi, a television star in Kosovo, portrays Fahrije as focused and withdrawn, outwardly strong but privately consumed by pain and longing for her missing husband.

The other women in the film also have distinct personalities, each facing their own version of the same drama. The group acts without filters and with such energy keeping an extraordinary intensity from the very beginning.

Stevan Filipović, a Serbian film editor, director and lecturer, pointed out that through films like this, we can look at how to move on and not spread hatred, but very few people end up doing so.

“In my opinion, this is one of the more revolutionary films from the region that I have seen, precisely because it addresses the political history and respects the victims but does not follow the narrative of victimhood.

I feel the human truth, the artistic truth, and I am really interested in whether you have a link to such communities,” said Filipović.

In this sense, many think that Hive can be seen as a complementary version of the Bosnian film Quo Vadis, Aida? offering another perspective on the aftermath of war and the ways in which women navigate its consequences.

British Albanian singer Dua Lipa has called the film a moving and inspiring story about the Kosovo women. “This story of hardship and perseverance is something that needs to be told,” Lipa said after the film’s premiere in Washington. “It speaks to the spirit of the Kosovar experience, and I hope it can contribute to the collective healing of families who have been separated and people who have lost their loved ones in war.”

Completely ignored in Serbia

In 2022, it won three major prizes at the Sundance Film Festival: The Grand Jury Prize for Best Film, Best Director, and the Audience Award. It also received the Horizonte Human Rights Film Award at the Five Lakes Film Festival near Munich.

Despite receiving extensive coverage in local and international media, Hive was completely overlooked by Serbian-language media in Kosovo and Serbia.  It was barred from Serb screens, effectively keeping it away from the public.

Kosovo’s media landscape remains deeply divided along ethnic lines, and art dealing with the legacy of the war often remains distant from audiences and critics on the other side of the ethnic divide.

Hive was featured only at the Forum for Transitional Justice in Belgrade, organized by RECOM, a regional initiative for establishing the facts about war crimes and other serious human rights violations committed in the former Yugoslavia.

“Hive is a memory, for all audiences,” says Nataša Kandić, founder of the Belgrade-based Humanitarian Law Center. “It shows how, after the crime and everything that happened, life begins again for the sake of others – for the children and for the future,” she added.

Basholli captured a chapter of post-liberation Kosovo, showing how a woman’s emancipation can become a form of liberation for an entire community, as happened in this war-torn village. Many who have seen the film believe it successfully memorialized this post-conflict chapter in the collective memory.

“This film is more about the possibility of change and redemption,” Basholli said.

Three decades after the conflicts ended, the time has come to confront the horrors of the wars in Kosovo and across the former Yugoslavia – and to process their enduring legacy of trauma, loss, and pain. Cinema remains one of our most potent tools for this reckoning. The films exist; the only question is who is allowed to watch them, under what conditions, and who controls what the public learns about them before the lights ever fade.

The article was created within the project “Presented / Digital Majority – Cross-Border Reporting”, which is implemented by the Foundation for the Development of Media and Civil Society “Mediacentar” in cooperation with the organization Pro Peace in Bosnia and Herzegovina.