31st Sarajevo Film Festival: Dealing with the Past

From 16 to 22 August 2025, twenty-two young participants from across the region gathered in Sarajevo to explore this year’s theme — The Weight of Memory, The Power of Now. The program invited them to reflect on how societies confront difficult pasts, how remembrance shapes identity, and how art and dialogue can become tools for justice and empathy.

Dealing with the Past — and the Present

Building on the long-standing partnership between FES SOE and the Dealing with the Past program of the Sarajevo Film Festival, this year’s youth program created a space for honest dialogue and emotional reflection. Through film screenings, lectures, field visits, and creative workshops, participants explored the ways memory continues to influence politics, relationships, and everyday life in the region.

The program opened at Europe House, where FES program manager Saša Vasić and our program partners welcomed participants. Facilitators Lejla Gačanica and Slobodan Blagovčanin guided the youth team throughout the week, encouraging personal introspection and critical discussion. Their sessions helped participants connect the historical and emotional dimensions of remembrance to contemporary challenges of justice, identity, and coexistence.

The first sessions, led by sociologist Dino Abazović, examined whether societies in the region are truly “dealing with the past” — or still living within it. This discussion was complemented by a walking lecture through Vraca Memorial Park, led by Danijela Dugandžić and the feminist collective Crvena, where participants reflected on the often-neglected stories of resistance and the legacy of women fighters during World War II.

Art, Protest, and the Right to Remember

Throughout the week, the participants engaged with artists, filmmakers, and activists whose work interrogates the politics of memory. At Gallery Manifesto, curators Benjamin Čengić and Adna Muslija presented art as a space of dialogue and resistance, while visits to Gallery 11/07/95 and the History Museum of Bosnia and Herzegovina offered profound encounters with the tangible and emotional weight of remembrance.

The program also addressed unconventional formats of remembrance — from humour as resistance, presented by Zenit Đozić, to photography as testimony, explored with Damir Šagolj. Discussions on protest as a form of public memory, led by Yannis Karpouzis, Aleksandar Reljić, and Christina D. Bartson, invited participants to think about activism as an act of remembrance and solidarity.

Sessions with human rights defenders and filmmakers — including Hasan Hasanović from the Srebrenica Memorial Centre and Ajna Jusić from Forgotten Children of War — emphasized the moral and emotional courage behind testimonies of survival. 

Youth as Witnesses of the Present

The In Youth Eyes program reaffirmed that memory is not a static concept or confined to the past. It lives and evolves through how young people choose to see, tell, and engage with their surroundings. In this sense, dealing with the past also means dealing with the now — confronting today’s injustices, disinformation, and polarization.

Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung Dialogue Southeast Europe is proud to continue its cooperation with the Sarajevo Film Festival, ProPeace, and Europe House in nurturing youth perspectives that challenge inherited narratives and build empathy across borders. Programs like In Youth Eyes remind us that the courage to remember is also the courage to imagine — a future grounded in understanding, justice, and peace.