As a participant of the "Dealing with the Past" program, within the Sarajevo Film Festival, I had the honor of being part of a group that witnessed past events through incredible and raw cinematography. I liked how past events and experiences were expressed in quite an exhilarating and beautiful manner because for us, the younger generations, it is a perfect […]

Dealing with the past is one of the reasons why one may create a work of art. People use art to deal with what happened to them and as a result, many create movies, write books, music, TV series and plays.  The fact that these forms of art resulted from the human need for expression gives a complete dimension of […]

How do you deal with something you did not do or had any influence on? Why discuss topics that don’t bother you? Why watch movies set in the problematic past? I got questions like these while going to the Dealing with the Past (DwP) Program, which was part of this year’s Sarajevo Film Festival. The Sarajevo Film Festival can’t be […]

A warm August afternoon in the middle of the 25th Sarajevo Film Festival, at a conference room without daylight, filled with chairs similar to school benches and a group of youth from the region participating in the Dealing with the Past Programme [L1]. I thought that there would be no discussion, because there was the SFF and socialising on the […]

”I had a dream about my Nermin…”, says a Srebrenica mother, Saliha Osmanović, while we are sitting in her dead children’s room, which has not changed a bit.   The village Dobrak is located an hour’s drive away from Srebrenica and the trip to the village takes quite some time. The car is crawling on worn roads, passing through green […]

It’s Saturday evening, April 23rd 2016 at the A3 café-club in Knin, and young people are pouring in. The concert of the band Darkwood from Sinj is about to begin. I came to Knin on some other day intentionally to avoid the anniversary of Oluja. We are sitting with the 48-year-old local the late Dragan Babić, who regularly comes to […]

On the 28th of June 2018, at the Government’s proposal, the Serbian National Assembly symbolically issued the “Law on War Memorials”. This Law foresees legal provisions governing memorialization of the Republic of Serbia’s war history, starting from the First Balkan War to the last conflict in Kosovo (1912-1999). Over the past 40 years, state narratives have standardized three laws on […]

Photo credit: YIHR What exactly is the difference between past, present, and future? Most of us would perhaps argue that the answer to that question is an obvious one – the time before the moment we are living in, be it one second or thousands of years ago, is the past; this moment, now, is the present; and whatever is […]

Post-war memorial architecture in the Balkans can be described as selective memory in material form: it mainly reflects a mono-national perspective on the event it memorializes, which is the active agent for deepening divisions and stalling the reconciliation process. By 2016, there were 2,100 registered memorials built for civil victims or soldiers from the last war in Bosnia and Herzegovina […]

In most Eastern European countries, the architecture of the socialism era was characterized by a rise of monuments as an admixture of nationalism and socialism. Almost every country in the socialist camp had its own “Mother”[1], proudly eternalized in bronze: from Ukraine to Georgia, to Armenia, to Russia and to Albania. These monuments depict anonymous women[2], an incarnation of the […]

Fake news has existed, still exist and will continue to exist. This is not something new, fake news is as old as the real news. But, the means and methods that are used for producing and distributing fake news are novel. Modern communication skills, advanced technology, the boom of social networks and the continuous rise in the number of users, […]

There may be more beautiful times, but this one is ours – JEAN-PAUL SARTRE I was dreaming about myself as a boy with a red scarf around my neck, while I was carrying the torch for comrade Tito. The bright blue shopping centre Sarajka instead of BBI, which is the only thing from the pre-war period I remember. I remember […]