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

Abstract

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.

“Exposition”

During my PhD fieldwork in St. Louis in the summer of 2022 on the impact of the unresolved issue of missing persons from the Bosnian genocide on the everyday lives and memories of the surviving families in the diaspora, I stayed with my host family of the Srebrenica genocide survivors. It was during this time that my friend, Gemma, paid me a visit. I grew close to my host family who graciously welcomed yet another unfamiliar face into their suburban home for a brief stay. Gemma, hailing from Texas, knew nothing about the Srebrenica genocide before she met Hasija and Adil, my host parents. As I became increasingly absorbed in my research, I often found myself sharing information about the historical event and emphasizing the significance of our chance connection with Hasija. While Gemma gained firsthand insights into Bosnian hospitality, impeccable housekeeping standards, and the delights of pogača ¹ within the confines of their St. Louis residence, Hasija’s personal tragedy, which had brought us all together in her living room, remained somewhat elusive to my friend.

One hot summer day, I put on the film Quo Vadis, Aida? (dir. Jasmila Žbanić, 2020), ² after which the three of us silently went on to watch Halima’s Path (dir. Arsen Anton Ostojić, 2012), and then Snow (dir. Aida Begić, 2008)— all of which delved into the harrowing theme of the Bosnian genocide and the enduring gendered ramifications of the men who perished in it. Some of the scenes were distressing for Gemma, who murmured to me: “Is it okay for Hasija to watch this?” This was the moment when I realised that, like many ethnographers engaging in the study of human suffering and prolonged exposure to studied communities (see Marcus and Fischer, 1986), I had grown somewhat accustomed to the subject matter over time. After all, I am Bosnian, “one of them”, as my respondents reminded me frequently, and since I remember them, the theme of war and its legacies have been part of the everyday language in my household.

Moreover, I also considered that my emic Bosnian-ness and the close relationship established with Hasija made me sensitive to her threshold of tolerance for genocide-themed content. However, Gemma’s considerate question jolted my partial (and relatively suppressed) outsiderness and led me to re-think how Hasija would feel about watching a film that vividly and quite accurately re-enacts her personal trauma. I casually relayed the question to Hasija, to which she deeply sighed and replied: “It is difficult. But this must be seen . . . it must be . . .” (Teško je, ali mora se, mora se.), turning her head to the screen where Jamaat (local Muslim congregation), comprised of 10 young widows, carried out the morning prayer in the roofless mosque and men-less village before us.

The Bosnian War (1992–1995) resulted in a profound loss of life, with approximately 100,000 casualties and enduring trauma for those who survived, as well as an unknown number of women and girls who suffered sexual violence, and tens of thousands who were tortured and detained in concentration camps (Allen, 1996; Stiglmayer, 1994; Wesselingh and Vaulerin, 2005). Forced displacement following the conflict caused Bosnia to lose nearly half its pre-war population, creating a vast Balkan diaspora (Halilovich et al., 2018; MHRRBiH, 2017: 67). Yet, the genocide against Bosniaks ³ remains distinctive for the category of “the missing persons,” the 32,000 (mostly Bosnian Muslim men) that disappeared, but who were actually killed by their Serb compatriots and buried in clandestine mass graves (Halilovich, 2014; ICTY, 2001; Wagner, 2008). Most of them perished in Prijedor, during the 1992 “ethnic cleansing”, and in the 1995 Srebrenica genocide, which marked the most intense episodes of genocidal violence throughout the war (Cigar, 1995).

To hide the evidence of war crimes, the Serb military buried the corpses in mass graves and later re-interred them using heavy machinery, resulting in brutal disarticulation of victims’ bodies that complicated later efforts to account for them (Jennings, 2013; Wagner, 2008, 2014). For nearly three decades, forensic experts from around the world have painstakingly worked to locate, recover, and identify the bodily remains of the missing Bosniaks, in a bid to provide closure for their grieving families (Bećirević, 2015; Jennings, 2013; Sadikovic, 2019). Considering that, in many cases, male members of whole families were wiped out, in the aftermath of the genocide, many Bosniak families were reduced to war widows and their children—now largely displaced and forgotten (Hadziomerovic, 2023; Halilovich, 2019; Leydesdorff, 2011).

These women encounter additional challenges within the patriarchal structure of the Balkans due to deeply entrenched gender stereotypes that have traditionally pervaded the societal organization (Cockburn, 1998; Kesić, 1999). Given the predominant rural origins of the majority of Bosniak war widows, wherein they were ingrained with customary norms related to conventional child-rearing and domestic duties, the absence of men in their daily lives has given rise to a multitude of complexities. These predicaments arise due to their obligation to concurrently assume both the mantle of provider and that of nurturer (ICTY, 2001: 91; Spahić-Šiljak, 2010). In the present article, weaving my ethnographic data with that of ethnographic film analysis, I aim to illustrate the often-overlooked challenges that these women encounter in their daily lives in the absence of their men.

Note on methodology

I spent three years conducting my anthropological study of the sociocultural impact of the unresolved issue of the missing persons from the Bosnian genocide on social identities, memories and migration patterns of the surviving families from Srebrenica and Prijedor, now living in the diaspora. My ethnographic fieldwork spanned three countries: Bosnia and Herzegovina (hereafter Bosnia), the United States, and Australia, and cyberspace. As an ethnic Bosniak, my cultural positionality enabled me to gain a deeper understanding of community life and to create a sense of closeness and trust with surviving family members, especially women.

Within my research approach I combined multi-sited, conventional, and digital ethnography with narrative inquiry, within the Participatory Action Research (PAR) framework. Throughout the research process, collaborative engagement with participants was integral. This involved cooperative efforts in setting up research interviews, social activities, data interpretation, and co-creation of environment supportive of free expression, which included survivors’ letters, diary entries, photographs, etc. My participants included families of the persons who disappeared in the Prijedor’s 1992 “ethnic cleansing” and the 1995 Srebrenica genocide, along with community actors and forensic experts. Through my ethnographic immersion in the daily lives of diaspora-based surviving communities I principally focused on their practices and rituals of long-distance mourning and remembering the missing relatives. In addition to my main data collection methods of in-depth interviews and participant observation (both in the field and online), I included the documentary and visual analysis of various form(at)s that capture the pervasive absence of the missing Bosniaks in survivors’ everyday lives.

In this article, I combine ethnographic film analysis with my ethnographic field observations to achieve a nuanced portrayal of how the unresolved issue of the missing Bosniaks impacts the everyday realities of the surviving communities deprived of men and a sense of closure. I tie my analysis to the conceptual framework of Marita Sturken (1997), “cultural memory”, and Ariela Azoulay’s (2019) concept of “potential history” to emphasize the importance of popular film in history-shaping from below.

The role of film in the service of memory

My “host mother” Hasija does not regularly ponder about the art value of motion picture, nor does she engage in a contemplative dissection of its representation; but she is well aware of its power to educate and instigate social action. And she knows that tragedy “must be seen” to be recognized and subsequently addressed. The moral deliberation between Hasija, Gemma and myself relative to the cost–benefit analysis of engaging in the spectatorship of cinematic reconstruction of the genocide that one of us survived, as well as our vastly distant positions within its context—the survivor, the researcher and the visiting bystander—evoked a keen interest on my side, resulting in the present article. Hasija’s remarks were not the first where I had encountered survivors’ appreciation for the artistic medium as a “memory vehicle” (Zelizer, 2004), reflected in the surviving communities’ substantial attending of exhibitions, book promotions and film screenings featuring the Bosnian genocide. ⁴

Art that tackles large-scale trauma cannot be divorced from the politics that created it, in the sense that art itself is a form of “personal” expression and thus a “political” statement, where it either propagates, denounces, subverts, or disseminates the ideological politics behind the violence it represents (Bourke, 2017). Throughout history, artists have leveraged the subtlety and ambiguity of art forms to tackle social taboo (Hirsch, 2008). In a similar vein, the cinematic medium has been strategically employed in the Bosnian post-war context to broach the social dialogue on the enduring legacies of the mass disappearances, a subject that continually maintains its taboo status (cf. Halilovich, 2017).

In the context of the large-scale trauma, an art form becomes an instrument for translating the complex narratives of “the indicible” and “the unvivable” into digestible material and familiar visual vocabulary (Angelini and Connel, 2019; Oostdijk, 2018). From the Holocaust scholarship we learned that film is nonpareil in its capacity to reach a broad and diverse audience and disseminate historical knowledge about people’s suffering (Ginsberg, 2004; Hirsch, 2008; Rentschler, 2002), becoming integral to the forming of cultural imagination and “mediation of memory in modern cultural life” (Grainge, 2003: 1). Considering film’s capacity to capture the intricacies of everyday life and closely reflect the sociocultural realities, it bears great relevance in the context of anthropological research (cf. Schneider, 2021).

A documentary film is always a “representation” of culture, usually a story told from one side and cannot bear the weight of an objective frame. As Balikci (1995) notes, visual anthropology principally seeks to reconstruct the culture—a single trait or the whole—either through the production of an ethnographic film or through an ethnographic analysis of the existing film, in which I engage in this article. Either form of such cultural reconstruction is not an attempt to extract and portray the “exotic” or the extraordinary parts of the culture, but rather to (re)present the mundane aspects of it, and thus approximate us to the everyday lives of the group of interest.

In the Bosnian post-genocide era, living in the village without men, talking with their bare absences, aimlessly searching, and endlessly waiting for them to “(re)appear”, receiving calls from forensic experts to attend “recognition sessions” of partial skeletons laid on the cold concrete floors of improvised forensic facilities, and moral dilemmas of “uncertain” widowhood all constitute the very mundane reality of the surviving families, and not merely isolated cases. The films that I discuss here were made to portray the general state of the Bosnian post-war havoc, however, considering the trans-local social organization of the surviving communities in the diaspora (cf. Halilovich, 2013); these filmed realities to a great degree extend to represent the everyday struggles of Bosniak widows in the diaspora, many of whom I visited and, at times, watched and discussed these films with. In this article, I discuss the pivotal role of popular film in initiating a social discourse on the legacies of Bosnian wartime disappearances within the intimate domains of home, family, and the surviving communities, but also its significance in shaping history through our role as spectators.

(The) missing on the big screen

In general, Bosnian post-war cinematography has thrived on the themes of women’s struggle without men (Jelača, 2016), poignantly reflecting the actual social surreality that is brimful of their absences. While some films explicitly tackle the unresolved issue of the missing, others incorporate a scene or tangential narrative that touches upon this topic. Nonetheless, the silences contained within these cinematic voids magnify the corrosive impact of the absences on the broader social tissue. I divided the following text into three parts: gaps, absences, and silences ⁵ relative to the subject of the disappeared and their ethnographic portrayals on the big screen, which I relate back to my ethnographic data from the field.

Gaps

Within the context of discussing the “gaps” in the social lives of the surviving families, I decided to touch on the film Halima’s Path (“Halimin Put”, 2012, dir. Arsen Anton Ostojić) for several reasons, including its thematic focus on the oft-neglected lacuna concerning the identification of remains of adopted children. The film is based on the real-life case of late Prijedorčani, ⁶ Zahida and Muharem Fazlić, who had been burdened by the absence of their adopted son and their inability to contribute in any way to account for him—namely, with their DNA (cf. Carmichael, 2015: 173). In the film exposition we learn that the action is set in a village near Prijedor, where a young Bosniak girl, Safija, finds out that she has been made pregnant by her Serb boyfriend.

After abusive treatment by her family, Safija gives birth to a boy who is adopted by her childless aunt Halima, and leaves the village for good. Fast forward, the film takes us to the early 2000s in Prijedor, portrays a radically altered village life, devoid of men and marked by a pervasive sense of loss. We learn that Aunt Halima lost both her husband and adopted son in the “ethnic cleansing” in Prijedor and continues to look for them after many years. Early on, the film follows with ethnographic vignettes of the grim reality of Bosnian war widows, where we see the frail Halima engage in traditionally male household tasks, such as fixing the house and clearing the snow.

As she pounds the nail into the doorframe, discussing her insomnia with her sister-in-law, her neighbor runs to tell her: “Halima, they arrived, they are in the school!”—referring to the group of forensic experts, as we soon discover. I learned from my interviews that the detached notion of “they” is how many Bosniak survivors refer to the foreign forensic workers in Bosnia, sometimes even vernacularly referred to as the “diggers” (kopači)—a term that accentuates the rift between mourning families and scientifically detached forensic servicemen. This scene in the film is preceded by another snapshot where two men, in white boilersuits, enter the long hall with sets of partial skeletons laid out on the floor, and carefully pick up the bones from one tray into the cardboard box, and with a black marker they inscribe the “code name” of the newly identified skeleton. The next scene alternates between the deafening silence in the waiting room and disturbing cries emanating from Halima’s internal vortex of memories when her son and husband were taken away.

As Halima enters the room, we are presented with the cold and detached treatment of the family members by the forensic case workers as they scorn Halima and inundate her with scientific and anglicized concepts of DNA identification. Yet, in reality, the “secret language” of forensic workers ceased to perplex the mourning women long ago. For example, I learned in the field that one of those recently vernacularized terms among Bosniak war widows is the noun sekundarizacija (“secondarization”) and adjective sekundarisan (“secondarized”), where the former term refers to the practice of post re-burials of the victims’ bodies and their dispersal into the new mass graves, and the latter is used to describe whether a person’s body has been found complete or scattered across mass graves. These terms, and others such as “reference samples”, “DNA”, “reassociation” and even Latin names for big bones like “ulna” or “femur” are often casually thrown around the table where the women drink coffee and discuss the recent developments in their search for their beloved ones. What is striking is exactly the normalization of these mass disappearances as part of everyday life and the institution of scientific terms in the rural Bosnian colloquy and vernacular.

Back in the original scene, amidst a circle of foreigners clad in white coats, emerges “Lutvija”—a rare local employee who embodies a character from real life, the late Jasmin Odobašić. ⁷ After a long and convulsive speech by the Croatian forensic representative, Lutvija breaks Halima’s trance, pleading: “It can’t go without blood, Halima!” (Ne može bez krvi, Halima!)—not knowing that she is not the biological mother of her missing son Mirza. Halima’s silence powerfully relays the shame that many survivors feel when they could not identify their beloved ones by either visual recognition—and this heavy guilt subsequently induced many emotionally-charged misidentifications (see Hadziomerovic, 2023)—or their DNA reference sample was not (close) enough.

The question of why Halima does not just divulge to the forensicists why her blood does not “forensically” suffice is not simple. Amid the complex dynamics of living in a closely-knit post-genocide community, factors such as cultural stigma linked to adoption and the shame of feeling “ineffective” in facilitating the retrieval of one’s deceased child, all converge to fuel a sense of denial. For Halima, motherhood transcended mere biological ties—a sentiment that early on hampered the processes of forensic restoration of individual identities. The portrayal of Halima’s case, as an extended family to her adopted son distant by blood to the extent that she cannot help in accounting for him, is representative of many cases of Bosnian families fragmented by the genocide.

These families suffer in two ways: for their tragic and ambiguous loss (Boss, 2002), and for the fact that their blood is “useless” in the context of retrieving the bodies of their beloved ones and providing them with a dignified burial. Eventually, “Halima’s case” (that is the real-life case of Zahida and Muharem Fazlić) was a catalyst for the scientific improvements in the initial DNA identification method to accommodate extended family members’ DNA—the Massive Parallel Sequencing technology implemented since 2019 (cf. Parsons et al., 2019). The film is important for tackling the taboo associated with child adoption and addressing the lacunae in post-genocide society where an unknown number of surviving relatives were devastated by the scientific breakthrough in DNA identification of the missing, knowing that their agency dies with those four drops of blood they had given.

Halima’s Path is interspersed with poignant scenes of Halima’s lonely life in the village and scenes of transient relief from her tragic faith, which she finds in the craft of weaving and her sojourns to the makeshift cemetery, where she recites fatiha ⁸ in front of the green wooden grave marker, inscribed with the name of her newly retrieved and reburied husband Salko, and the gap between his and the next headstone—that awaiting her missing son’s remains. The ethnographic narrative contained within this scene ties to those from my own ethnographic encounters with Bosniak widows, telling a story about the universal human need to root and demarcate their loss before moving on—the story of suspended closure.

Absences

Considering the deeply patriarchal culture that has historically prevailed in the Balkan region, especially in rural areas, the mass absences of men shook affected communities to their core, amplifying the pre-existing gender gap and effectuating a reform of the broader cultural life. Since the greatest massacres during the Bosnian War were committed on the village populations, mostly because they were easier and more “desirable” to exterminate due to the tradition of a larger family count, the women from the rural Bosnian areas suffered the most (Hadziomerovic, 2023). Next to their family losses, most of these housewives, whose pre-war lives revolved around the village and their household (Bringa, 1995), lost their sense of purpose as well. The haunting absences of men, children and family-oriented community life became women’s new grim realities that do not heal with time.

This is nowhere as vividly represented as it is in the Bosnian feature film, Snow (“Snijeg”, 2008), directed by Bosniak Aida Begić. The film centers on the life of surviving women and girls in the small, isolated village in eastern Bosnia, almost completely divested of men and boys, with the only exception of an elderly Imam and his selectively mute grandson. By merely looking at the population of the village, a viewer can infer that something terrible happened to them. The film follows a dramaturgical narrative where destitute women are faced with the moral dilemma of whether to sell their lands to Serb businessman in order to survive. However, Snow is more of an endeavor to ethnographically portray the slow village life, filled with idle moments and chit-chats, forbidden dreams and hidden fantasies of the young, the grounded actions of the mature women, and the communal solidarity that unravels in the moments of idyllic joy and shared trauma.

Unlike previous filmographic portrayals of the post-war gloom, inspired by medieval-like destitution and aridity, Snow in contrast paints a picture of profound melancholia, a subtle balance of pain, honor, exhaustion, and resilience through extended attention to communal locavore moments and sensibilities. The picturesque vignettes of women attending morning prayer (sabah) in the ruins of the roofless village mosque, as the warm pink sunrise wraps around them; of an elderly lady weaving ponjava (a traditional Bosnian rug) in the dark; and of the young widows preparing pekmez (plum jam), are aesthetically pleasing as much as emotionally unsettling, for they all hide the absences of the men and boys who perished just a year before. These scenes also portray the efforts of women to divert themselves from the inner pain by absorbing themselves in each other and reenacting their pre-war daily chores.

I observed similar communal activities in diasporic contexts during my field research. As their children reached adulthood, war widows from Prijedor and Srebrenica, now in the autumn of their lives, find peace and distraction in shared hobbies and domestic rituals, such as tending their gardens and engaging in traditional making of winter preserves. Among the surviving widows of Prijedor, I observed a widespread commitment to the practice of making tarhana—a sundried pulse made from wheat flour, used in preparing homemade tomato soup. Tarhana often served as a point of connection and conversation, especially during social gatherings with somber undertones, such as commemorations of the victims of “ethnic cleansing” that I attended during my fieldwork. Women often avoided explicit references to the tragedies and sadness that effectively brought them together, but rather greeted each other warmly with questions about the next “tarhana-making” gatherings. As they age, these locavore moments and practices of homemaking become essential resources that women deploy as they navigate the labyrinths of their tragedies, which took them so far away from their ancestral homes.

Silences

Speaking of everyday customs and depictions of domesticity, the last film that I choose to discuss is Days and Hours (“Kod amidže Idriza, 2004, dir. Pjer Žalica), which is arguably the most compelling ethnographic portrayal of cultural life in Bosnian komšiluk ⁹ on the big screen, but also of the taboo theme of the missing within the intimate family sphere. The film covers two days of Faruk’s visitation to his old uncle and aunt who lost their only son Emin in the war. The central action revolves, although peripherally, around Faruk’s car that stopped working, and his overnight stay at his uncle Idriz’s house.

Following the car breakdown, Aunt Sabira convinces Faruk to sleep in the room of their late son, which brings to a head the intimate conflict between the old couple. The powerful visual metaphor of Emin’s untouched, immaculate room, filled with his possessions as if he is expected to come home any day, narrates the tensions, intricacies, and silences between the old couple as they separately come to terms with their son’s unresolved death. Through Žalica’s camera lens, rife with references and lines derived from the quotidian Bosnian colloquies, we discover the chronic heaviness of absence in the couple’s everyday life.

For example, in the scene of customary slow coffee drinking (cf. Croegaert, 2020) and a light discussion between Aunt Sabira and Faruk about his eventual marriage, we follow the smooth meandering of the conversation to the topic of Aunt Sabira’s widowed daughter-in-law Šejla and her grandchild—the only living trace left behind by their son Emin. They discuss the widow’s absence and gradual distancing from family life, which Faruk criticizes, yet his aunt delicately justifies, thus exposing the gendered sensibilities in understanding the socio-cultural implications of the absence of men. At one moment, Sabira says:

You know that Idriz doesn’t let anyone reach Emin’s room, but the little one . . . blood is thicker than water . . . she always goes there, digging, questioning and so on . . . She should know, but again I think it would be best that we tell her, rather than to find out from others. And Šejla, she is here and there, saying she doesn’t want to disturb us . . . as if I don’t know her. Her heart is burning like a furnace. She doesn’t have to tell me anything, she tells me with her eyes everything. She gave us a child with that loss of ours . . . But I think it would be the best if we disassemble everything and deposit it somewhere, you know. . .

This single line of conversation, containing references to the clash between generations; the conflictual relationship between the bereaved father’s protective stance and his granddaughter’s initiative in breaking the silence about her father’s absence, as well as the two women’s silent solidarity of their shared loss and their readiness to move on, compellingly narrates the unspoken intrafamilial tensions associated with the disappearance of a beloved man. Even the referential choice of words carefully interwoven within Aunt Sabira’s narrative, such as “blood is thicker than water”, “digging” (for the truth), “disassembling” and “depositing”, all speak of the deep and pervasive involvement of the family’s search for their son and themselves in relation to his absence.

The last line, where Aunt Sabira expresses her opinion that the best solution would be to pack up Emin’s personal effects and store them away, move them out of sight, testifies to one mother’s capacity to embrace new beginnings and navigate forwards after the loss of a child. The fact that she confided this opinion to her infrequently visiting nephew demonstrates the socially transgressive notion of forging closure and moving on after the tragic loss of a child, especially one that remains open-ended.

Another important dialogue in the film from which we can grasp the taste of post-genocide familial tensions is the dialogue between Uncle Idriz and Faruk, where they discuss Idriz’s unfair treatment of his (former) daughter-in-law Šejla and her potential re-marriage. Faruk says to Idriz:

What about Šejla? She cannot spend the rest of her life mourning, in the memories.

To which Idriz replies, turning his head to pluck the string on his mandolin, implying his final stance on the issue:

She cannot go with someone else. She cannot when she did not even divorce from my Emin. Do you understand? She is still married to him! From my son she never divorced.

This scene in the film poignantly tackles the major social, cultural, and emotional obstacle that many young war widows and bereaved parents had struggled with in relation to the missingness of men.

The fallout between in-laws in the face of mass disappearances of men—the traditional pillars of family and wider Bosnian community—was a prominent theme in my own ethnographic fieldwork with the surviving families. Following the rupture of the bond that linked individuals within the consensual social construct of a kinship union, devoid of any substantive elements to uphold the cohesion, families simply disintegrated. For example, during my fieldwork in Melbourne, I learned from two siblings, Nihad and Seka, that concurrently with the loss of their brother in the Srebrenica genocide there followed the estrangement of his widow and son from the family, when they secretly resettled in the United States.

The siblings were convinced that their sister-in-law’s fleeing and cutting of the familial ties was due to her fear that the surviving family of her missing husband would take her son away. They elaborated that this reasoning stems from the cultural belief system rooted in patriarchy which puts primacy on male kin as the only valid extension of family trees (patrifocality). Indeed, the patrifocal aspect of Bosnian kinship culture suffered the greatest blow in the face of gendercide against men, whereas their mass absences from the cultural life incurred a dramatic shift to matrifocal social organization (Hadziomerovic, 2023).

This post-war social phenomenon of estranged widows was quite accurately translated into the film language of Day and Nights, where we see that the case of missing husbands transcends the immediate implications for the ritualistic burial and psychological closure to encompass broader sociocultural complexities that continue to perplex surviving family members decades after (cf. Hadziomerovic, 2023; Halilovich, 2019). From the film’s subtext, the intimate tensions between the couple evoked through the loss of a son emerge (cf. Mujčić, 2020), reflected in Idriz’s rigidity to let go—of Emin’s comeback—and Aunt Sabira’s readiness to regenerate and move on (cf. Bloch and Parry, 1982). Moreover, what the film documents the best within the context of the missing family members are the silences revolving around the men’s absences, which are not empty, but rather full of emotions: malaise, agony and nostalgia.

Resolution . . .?

Let’s return to the initial anecdote from my fieldwork, where my friend Gemma inquired whether my host mother, Hasija, was disturbed by viewing the film that vividly reenacts her most significant tragedy. My immediate response to Gemma’s question was confusion, for all I knew from my engagement with the Bosnian genocide survivors is that the tragedy that befell them in the local context is integral to their individual and collective sense of self, as well as their everyday lives even 30 years after, independent of how far they have physically “removed” themselves from it. The genocide is not merely the traumatic memory of a singular event that occurred in July 1995 in Srebrenica, to be contained as past and kept apart from the texture of everyday life. Indeed, I was told repeatedly that the pain never stops nor reduces in intensity, but the “recognition” of that pain that justifies it is what makes its presence more bearable.

As Haldemann (2008) argues, the injustice associated with victimization is more than infliction of pain and deprivation of social goods as it encompasses feelings of profound devaluation and loss of dignity. This is why recognition of suffering—in this case, the genocidal extent of the crime and loss—matters (cf. Fournet, 2007). It restores both individual and collective humanity through which we relate and empathize with each other (Wagner, 2008, 2015). The large-scale recognition of Prijedorčanis’ and Srebreničanis’ ¹⁰ ordeals, their loss and betrayal, form the basis for their sense of agency in history-making. This agency is that of having control over how they want to be represented, as well as control of how they want to represent their tragedies.

In her seminal work on the subject of “potential history”, Azoulay (2019) critiques the dominant historical narratives that often neglect the perspectives and experiences of oppressed marginalized groups. She uses the example of the consumption of the images of suffering within the dominant historical narrative as a tool that only further perpetuates the notion of “constituent violence” against “the Other”. Instead, Azoulay advocates for the inclusion of voices of the oppressed in history-making, as well as for observers’ critical engagement with the visual culture and media that represent the suffering.

Moreover, in her further scholarship on photography, Azoulay (2008, 2017) suggests that there is a “civil contract” embedded within the image, bearing certain ethical and political responsibilities that apply to all parties involved in the process of image-making: the creator of the image, the subject of the image and the observer. Upholding these responsibilities means engaging critically with the image; with the power dynamics and multiple perspectives, and the socio-political context that frames the scene. Although Azoulay (2019) was speaking about archived photographs, these observations can be applied in the context of popular film depicting the tragedies and “constituent violence” of everyday realities of the grief-stricken Bosnian war widows.

Similarly, in her study of popular film and “cultural memory”, Sturken (1997) ascertained the medium’s powerful impact in shaping societal memories of historical events. She argues that cinematic portrayals of historic suffering not only influence how the masses understand and interpret the past, but these cultural representations also shape how groups affected by these events experience, cope, and remember them. From this, it is patently clear that making a film about genocide and its legacies comes with a great deal of social responsibility. Less discussed is the ethical responsibility embedded within the spectatorship, which holds the potential for either perpetuating societal harm or contributing to the pursuit of justice for the oppressed.

Indeed, a good question might be: how should we engage with a popular film depicting a calamity “so big that it seems like an abstraction” (McCarthy and Hostetter, 2005: 4)? What sort of self-awareness and conscious choice can we make to ensure a humane approach to our consumption of human suffering? Drawing upon Sturken’s (1997) argument about the dual impact of popular film in shaping historical interpretation, I suggest that our critical engagement with the cinematic representations of the “constituent violence” and wounded subjectivities of the oppressed, is a way of participating in the co-construction of the “potential history” narrative (Azoulay, 2019).

In the closing credits of many post-war Bosnian films, due acknowledgement is granted to the surviving women’s associations for their contribution to the realization of the cinematographic projects. One such association is “Mothers of the Enclaves of Srebrenica and Žepa”, who not only acted as consultants in screenwriting, ensuring the veracity of their portrayals, but in some cases even starred as extras in the ghastly scenes of mass grave excavations (i.e. “Belvedere”; Imamović, 2010). Their participation in the film production indicates their belief in the value of sharing their “unspectacular” worlds with a broader audience through artistic representation, possibly driven by the conviction that adversity warrants societal recognition.

Now, one might say that jurisprudential proclamation of their tragedy as the crime of all cimes—the genocide (ICTY, 2001)—might seem to suffice but, even though this formal recognition does impart some sense of justice and closure, women’s daily struggles remain largely in the shadows. In this instance, the format of popular film, with its unique ability to evoke emotional responses and engage viewers intellectually with sensitive subjects (Gross and Levenson, 1995; Kimura et al., 2019), brings the audience closer to the social realities on the margins of society. As I noted at the beginning of this section, Gemma’s question of whether my host mother Hasija is unsettled by the film Quo Vadis, Aida? (dir. Jasmila Žbanić) utterly confused me, because I knew that what probably concerned Hasija, more than the anticipation of potential discomfort evoked by the film, was whether Gemma would grasp the gravity of human evil that happened in Srebrenica through what is depicted on the screen. Hasija was not looking for Gemma’s sympathy, but rather using the moment of our shared spectatorship as a point of reference for when her whole world changed.

Closing remarks

In this article I discussed the reverberating effect of unresolved absences from the 1992-1995 Bosnian War in the contours of the everyday existence of the surviving families by weaving together my field data with ethnographic analysis of popular post-war film. My goal was to illuminate the salience of film in the service of collective memory of the genocidal past, but also its ethnographic significance in social research. Through various examples, I discussed the capacity of film to capture the quintessence of the human condition that fosters viewers’ empathy with the victimized group depicted on the screen. Moreover, I argued that, through its anchorage within a specific narrative—of individual loss, survival, and personal quest—film acts as a powerful antidote to the dehumanizing damage done through the utilitarian stratagem of quantification of the victims, (over)historicization of events and ethnicization of loss, which are integral to nationalist rhetoric in post-war Bosnia.

Cinematography, as examined within the context of the experiences of Bosniak war widows, assumes a distinct feminist agency. In this capacity, it adopts a pivotal role as a conduit that sheds light on the everyday struggles and realities faced by women dwelling on the social margins. The present article opens up a space for further exploration of constructs, narratives, and representation of Bosnian women in film as a framework for critical analysis of their placement within the wider post-war sociopolitical context. Further analysis could benefit from the contextualization within the frameworks of feminist film theory and critique.

In conclusion, I argue that a combination of ethnographic film analysis and field data complement each other in the context of anthropological research since both are concerned with the treatment of everyday life on the margins—like that of Bosniak war widows. By exploring the imbrications of missingness on screen and in real life, my goal was to emphasize their lingering manifestations that transcend the physical void and illuminate the complex ways in which the missing are intricately woven into the socicultural fabric of Bosnian post-war society.