DokuTalks

What Remains? Film, Memory and Unfinished Justice

A family recording, a theatre performance, a museum object or a building marked by surveillance can carry a difficult history into public view. But none speaks for itself. Each is shaped by choices about what is preserved, what is shown and what remains outside the frame.

What Remains? Film, Memory and Unfinished Justice brings together perspectives from cinema, theatre, museums, architecture and public institutions. The discussion asks what happens when personal experience and testimony become part of a film, exhibition, performance or public narrative. Who shapes the story once it becomes public? How can artists work with another person’s experience without taking ownership of it? And when might restraint be more responsible than showing everything?

The conversation will move between family archives, rehearsal rooms, museum collections, spaces carrying contested histories and the institutions that decide how the past is remembered. It will also examine the limits of cultural work. Film and art can preserve traces, challenge denial and create public recognition, but they cannot replace legal justice or restore what has been lost.

What responsibility remains after a film is completed, an exhibition closes or public attention moves elsewhere? And how can difficult histories be passed to younger generations without allowing conflict to become their only inheritance?

 This DokuTalk is part of the “Beyond Silence – Empowering Voices for Justice and Memory” Project, implemented by DokuFest in partnership with the Humanitarian Law Center Kosovo (HLC Kosovo). The project is made possible with the assistance of the regional project EU Support to Confidence Building in the Western Balkans, which is funded by the European Union (EU) and implemented by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP).

Panelists

Elma Hašimbegović – historian and director of the History Museum of Bosnia and Herzegovina, whose work explores contested histories and the museum’s role as a space for public dialogue.

Norika Sefa – Kosovo filmmaker whose work moves between fiction and documentary, using fragmented images and personal archives to question how memory is constructed.

Elisabetta Terragni – architect, exhibition designer and professor whose museum work, including the House of Leaves in Tirana, explores how buildings can preserve and communicate difficult histories.

Tara Manić – theatre director and assistant professor at the Faculty of Dramatic Arts in Belgrade, whose practice considers care, trust and responsibility when approaching sensitive material.

Saranda Bogujevci – Kosovo’s Minister of Culture and Tourism, bringing a perspective shaped by testimony, artistic and curatorial work, parliamentary service and institutional responsibility.

Moderated by

Veton Surroi – Kosovo journalist, writer and civil society activist whose work has long engaged with politics, conflict, democratic transition and public responsibility. 

Materials developed through Beyond Silence will also be presented as an exhibition that opens on August 12 at Shani Efendi Gallery, bringing the project’s reflections on memory, loss, courage and hope into a shared public space.

Admission to DokuTalks is free. Seating is limited and available on a first-come, first-served basis.