Ceasefire and the Memory of Genocide

The article analyses the short documentary film Ceasefire (Prekid vatre, Jakob Krese, 2025), which addresses the life practices of the genocide survivors from Srebrenica who currently live in the Ježevac refugee settlement. Through the scenes of everyday life, the film raises questions about the relationship between personal and collective memory, between trauma and its transmission and between the aesthetics and the politics of representation. The analysis is situated within the theoretical frameworks of Maurice Halbwachs on collective memory, Cathy Caruth on trauma, Aleida Assmann on communicative and cultural memory and Marianne Hirsch on postmemory, among others. We emphasise that, through his formal restraint and a focus on everyday realities, Krese does not reproduce suffering but instead creates a cinematic counter-archive that empowers subjects and asserts living memory.

<span class=”paragraph-note”>The integral version of this article can be found in the printed KINO! </span>