The Politics of Absence

As resident editor for the month of January of 2026 at A*DESK entitled The Politics of Absence, I have chosen to focus on the emergence of women filmmakers across the Western Balkans, with particular attention to the new wave of cinema coming from Kosovo. Beyond their explicitly feminist perspective, what strikes me most about many of these films is a shared poetics of absence.

Across their practice, these filmmakers place absence—whether emotional, historical, or physical—is placed at the very center of their cinematic inquiry. It is not treated as a void, but as a generative space: one from which to question what has been silenced, erased, hidden, lost or rendered invisible. These films insist on absence as something active and unresolved, a condition that shapes subjectivity, memory, and social life.

To expand this reflection, I have invited journalists from across the region, alongside filmmakers themselves, to reflect on the power of cinema to make visible what patriarchy, history, and structures of power have persistently sought to keep unseen. What emerges is a constellation of perspectives that foreground women’s subjectivities, memories, trauma, and everyday experiences as legitimate—and urgent—political terrain.

This month’s programme unfolds through several interconnected contributions: Dafina Halili opens the issue with Shaping Stories: Kosovo’s Women-Led New Wave Cinema, tracing how a generation of filmmakers is redefining both national cinema and the conditions of visibility within it. This is followed by Between Anger and Tenderness: Two Kosovar Filmmakers in Dialogue, a conversation between Antoneta Kastrati and Kaltrina Krasniqi, where absence takes shape through bodies, grief, law, and inherited silence.

The dialogue continues with Kumjana Novakova and Norika Sefa in Between Absence and Presence: A Feminist Reimagining of Cinema from the Balkans, reflecting on the approach of cinema as a space for political questioning. Through absence, archives, and memory, their dialogue proposes new ways of narrating the past and present. Finally, Gresa Hasa’s essay Balkan Kinoscope: Bridging Past and Present Through a Reclaimed Gaze situates these practices within a broader regional history, showing how feminist filmmaking opens critical passages between past and present, memory and power.