Capturing absences: Cinematic mediations of widowhood and loss in post-genocide Bosnia

This article examines how post-war Bosnian cinema mediates the unresolved absences of the Bosnian War through its cinematic portrayals of widowhood, mourning, and survival. Drawing on multi-sited ethnographic fieldwork among Bosnian war widows and a close reading of three films— Halima’s Path (dir. Arsen Anton Ostojić, 2012), Snow (dir. Aida Begić, 2008), and Days and Hours (dir. Pjer Žalica, 2004)—the article explores how film operates simultaneously as a repository of cultural memory and as an ethnographic lens into the lived afterlives of genocide. I argue that cinematic narratives of absence and endurance offer a counterpoint to the dehumanizing tendencies of nationalist historiography and the quantification of loss, instead foregrounding the intimate textures of grief, resilience, and feminine agency. By weaving ethnographic observation with film analysis, the study illuminates how post-war cinematography assumes a feminist political role—making visible the everyday struggles of women on the social margins and reframing their experiences as central to collective remembrance. Ultimately, I contend that film and ethnography together reveal how the missing persist not as voids but as vital presences, intricately woven into the moral, emotional, and cultural fabric of post-genocide Bosnia.