The film medium acts as a specific tool to convey the socio-historical context and cultural memory of individual countries. In the post-Yugoslav area, the wars of the 1990s had a profound impact on the film industry. Already during the wars, filmmakers documented the conflicts, and today films are being made that explore both the immediate and long-term consequences of war, focusing on collective and intergenerational war trauma. Film proves to be a unique tool for the exploration of trauma, as it embodies the paradox of the representation of trauma, where the attempt to articulate or represent it inherently leads to distortion, the impossibility of articulation. In the thesis, the historical contextualisation of events in the Balkans in the 1990s is followed by an exploration of how the selected films serve as vehicles of cultural memory and how their narrative and visual representation contributes to the understanding of the collective war trauma. The selected films that are going to be analysed are Pretty Village, Pretty Flame, Men Don’t Cry, The Happiest Man in the World and No Man’s Land.
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