Mario Bova, the director of the Euro Balkan Film Festival (30 October-6 November), discusses how cinema can help heal the wounds of memory, and his goal of building bridges between the Balkans and Western Europe.

Cineuropa: On the 30th anniversary of the Srebrenica genocide and the Dayton Accords, the festival focuses on the so-called “Dayton generation”. In what way do you believe cinema can still help heal the wounds of memory today and transform them into a language of reconciliation?
Mario Bova: Cinema, with the evocative power of its images and the compelling ability to relive past experiences, serves as a true laboratory of coexistence. This is achieved through co-production, collaboration, exploration of history, and engagement with common issues. Along the way, there is a growing need to understand each other, to put forward ideas together, and to engage with the public on issues that shape society and the future. This is a valuable attribute: it helps people understand one another, accept one another, and seek shared solutions without spiralling into armed conflict and war. This is the role that the Euro Balkan Film Festival has chosen for itself, offering audiences a selection of testimonies that move from the anguish of war towards hope for the future. Symbolically, it moves from Srebrenica to Europe.

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Today, in particular, Euro-Balkan cinema, drawing on the tragedies of the past, gives voice to women and young people, supporting their struggles for societal transformation. In this context, calls for reconciliation, understanding and collaboration emerge, aimed at achieving progress and attaining peace.

This affirmation of “working together” through cinema strongly underscores the importance of networking in the Euro-Balkan area, the role of political and cultural integration processes, and the formative function of young people in the field of cinema and the audiovisual sector.

One of the festival’s main goals is to build bridges between the Balkans and Western Europe. What cultural resistance does this dialogue still encounter, and what concrete role can a festival in Rome play in overcoming it?
The barriers between the Balkans and Western Europe have not entirely disappeared. The 20th century – with its world wars, Balkan conflicts and the Cold War – left deep fractures: mistrust, separateness and difficulties in mutual understanding. The effects of those tragedies can still be felt today, in a distance between East and West that has lessened over recent decades, but has not been erased. This is why we now look to cinema: it’s a unique tool for interpretation and reflection, capable of fostering understanding and integration, while countering nationalist temptations and conflictual tendencies.

In particular, the Euro Balkan Film Festival in Rome was founded upon this goal: to promote encounters between different film industries as a shared laboratory, to interpret history together, to build a shared perspective, and to create opportunities for collaboration that contribute to a path of civil well-being.

Young people play a decisive role in this regard: the festival opens up specific spaces for training, dialogue and growth for them. We work with Italian schools and, increasingly, with Balkan ones, involving them in master classes, juries and co-production workshops. Because a new dialogue can emerge from young filmmakers – one less burdened by the weight of the past and more orientated towards a shared Europe.

The opening workshop addresses the relationship between authorial creativity and platform algorithms. In your view, how can European cinema defend its complex identity in an era dominated by the logic of the digital market?
It is the valorisation of the cultural exception at the EU level that builds a barrier against the massifying and simplifying effect of algorithms and platforms. In this uphill battle against standardisation, European cinema must rediscover the will to create a European market: to cultivate its own audience, and to build a community of viewers who perceive European stories as part of their shared imagination. It must build an autonomous model, based on independent production and on the historical consciousness of Europe’s peoples.

The main actions of European auteurs in favour of the cultural exception support the relevant guarantee policies that the European Union may wish to promote; crucial to this is collaboration with collection societies to safeguard fair remuneration for copyright.

Looking beyond 2025, what are the main challenges the festival intends to tackle in order to continue giving voice to Balkan and diasporic cinema? How do you envision the evolution of Euro-Balkan dialogue through cinema?
We will pursue the strategic goal of jointly training young people, offering them opportunities and experiences revolving around Euro-Balkan knowledge, encouraging collaborations between academies in the region, and fostering Italian-Balkan film and cultural encounters. We will encourage interest in mutual cultural exchange and joint production; we will grow a film audience more sensitive to the region’s productions and to co-productions. With our project, we will support the activities of our network of Italian (Adriatic and Ionian) and Balkan partners, so that their combined, solidarity-based action develops a much stronger and more effective force for growth. We will also support initiatives bringing Euro-Balkan auteurs together, to help safeguard the cultural exception as a guarantee of the quality and originality of European film production.