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Paper short abstract

This paper examines how participatory filmmaking empowers post-conflict communities to rebuild trust and agency. Drawing from practice-based work in the Balkans, it shows how creative visual storytelling contributes to peacebuilding beyond conventional development frameworks.

Paper long abstract

Arts-based peacebuilding is gaining renewed relevance as conflicts intensify and traditional development approaches struggle to address mistrust, trauma, and social fragmentation. This paper draws on my practice as a filmmaker working with post-conflict communities in Kosovo and the wider Balkans to explore how participatory and community-driven filmmaking can strengthen agency, dialogue, and collective imagination.

The paper demonstrates how collaborative film processes—co-writing testimonies, producing visual narratives with participants, and screening films within divided communities—create spaces where individuals can articulate lived experiences often excluded from institutional peacebuilding agendas. These creative encounters humanise former “others,” surface silenced emotions and memories, and establish new grounds for trust-building.

While highlighting the transformative potential of cinema as both method and intervention, the paper also critically reflects on its limitations: ethical challenges in representation, power dynamics between filmmaker and participant, risks of retraumatisation, and the tension between artistic expression and community expectations.

By situating these practice-based insights within broader debates on arts, culture, conflict, and development futures, the paper argues that filmmaking offers an alternative mode of evidence and engagement—one that repositions affected communities as co-authors of their own post-conflict futures. In doing so, it contributes to reimagining development through creative agency, emotional understanding, and shared storytelling in an uncertain world.