Conceived by Macedonian director Teona Strugar Mitevska together with Asja Krsmanović, of the Sarajevo Film Festival, the Sister Sister initiative was framed first as a public panel, followed by a think tank aiming to build a manifesto on authorship, funding equity and the future of women's cinema in the region, with French filmmaker Céline Sciamma joining as a special guest.

For Strugar Mitevska, Sister Sister is meant to be a space where she and women filmmakers can “define ourselves by ourselves entirely, a bold and fearless zone of not giving a damn”. She was blunt about the numbers behind the ambition, calling for 50-50 funding across the region's national film institutions, still mostly run by men, with only a handful of exceptions, and insisting that visibility in costume and make-up credits is no longer enough.

Kosovar-born director Blerta Basholli described an industry in her country with little money to begin with, where funding long flowed almost exclusively to male directors, a pattern she says has only recently begun to shift, with more women now reaching festivals as funding bodies change the stakes. And as women keep on making films, they are becoming the most visible and successful ones. Basholli's framing of the Kosovar landscape was pointed: the war women face isn't being fought on the front line, but is rather made up of women's ordinary, invisible battles.

Serbian director Jelena Maksimović, whose directorial debut, Until the Day Ends, has been selected for the Orizzonti competition at this year's Venice Film Festival and portrays Serbia's recent student protests and the wider wave of anti-government unrest sweeping the country, has no doubt about the role of cinema, which, for her, must always be political.

Asked to reflect on what it means to reclaim authorship, Sciamma paved the way towards imagining a new, harmonious situation in the future. With an honesty uncommon in the industry, she also spoke of privilege, as she comes from a country where public funding structures have allowed her to express her creativity and make films. But there has always been a political framing to what it has actually felt like to work inside the industry. Talking about her career, Sciamma described feeling at times “like a guerrilla element within the system”. It’s a system in which filmmakers, however accomplished, still have to ask permission from bankers to bring their ideas to fruition. She called this the paradox of submission built into a particular way of making cinema, and said the response it demanded of her was not compromise, but the search for a “radical tenderness”.

Sciamma traced this tension across her own filmography, describing her early features as films that danced within these paradoxes, rather than resolving them, before landing, with Portrait of a Lady on Fire and Petite Maman, closer to the movies she had actually wanted to make. The success, and the power she gained along the way, in turn gave her the freedom to give much of it up: a choice she called both challenging and privileged. This gave her the time to experiment, to dig into archives, and to begin researching and building a transfeminist history of film.

Sciamma was equally clear in drawing a distinction between a “female gaze” and a feminist one. For her, the difference is, of course, very political, not semantic: a feminist gaze names a position, a fight, a set of ideas about power, whereas “female” can too easily be flattened into a demographic descriptor.

The recurring theme across the room was the language of cinema: the difficulty of changing it, and the need to. The four directors agreed they had all spent years watching films that did not “love them”, since most of the movies that shaped their own cinematic language and way of thinking were made by men, with very rare exceptions. “I have spent my life watching films that hated me, and still, I feel a lot of love in this young form of art,” Sciamma said. Her point was that the more experimental, resistant and independent the work being made, the more clearly its radical potential becomes visible. The turning point in her professional life, she said, came the moment she stopped trying to belong. She connected that idea to a broader observation about absence – not an abandonment of the room, never a desertion, but a quest to find a new way of addressing an asymmetry she wants cinema to interrogate, rather than accommodate.

Sciamma also pushed the conversation beyond the industry's usual metrics of success (festival selections, distribution deals, funding percentages and so on), towards a bigger question: what is cinema actually for, socially? Music, for instance, is a form of art that has long understood its social function, she noted, and she wondered why cinema, still one of the youngest art forms and one that has developed almost entirely within capitalist structures, struggles to ask the same question of itself. Her closing note was an optimistic one: an invitation to imagine cinema participating in society, rather than simply competing within it.

The manifesto, subsequently discussed in a closed-door think tank, will gather the needs and desires, requests and demands of a large and diverse group of filmmakers from the former Yugoslavia, and is meant to turn, as Strugar Mitevska put it, “joyful hunger and revolutionary anger” into something with actual weight in terms of how the region's cinema gets made, funded and told – by women.