Peacebuilding is often described through the language of institutions: negotiations, agreements, confidence-building measures, transitional justice, dialogue platforms and international missions. These things matter. But societies rarely make peace through institutions alone. They also have to change the stories they tell about themselves—and about the people they have learned to see as enemies.

This is where art, and particularly cinema, can become important.

A peace agreement can stop people from shooting at one another. A film can sometimes begin the much slower process of allowing them to see one another differently.

Cinema has a peculiar ability to make political conflicts personal. Statistics tell us how many people were displaced. A film can show someone packing a suitcase at three in the morning. A report can describe a divided society. A movie can place two people from opposite sides of that division at the same kitchen table. Suddenly, the conflict is no longer an abstract dispute between “us” and “them.” It has faces, voices, awkward silences, jokes, memories and ordinary lives.

This matters because conflict is sustained not only by political interests but also by narratives. Generations inherit stories about who started the war, who suffered more, who betrayed whom and who can never be trusted. These narratives can become part of national identity. Challenging them directly can produce defensiveness. Art can approach the same questions sideways.

A film does not necessarily have to preach reconciliation. In fact, the opposite may be more powerful. A good film can simply create space for complexity. It can show that someone can be both a victim and a participant, that memories can contradict each other, or that two people can remember the same event completely differently.

Cinema can also preserve memories that official histories leave behind. The archive of a conflict is not only made of treaties and military documents. It is also made of kitchens, photographs, abandoned houses, songs, objects, family jokes and stories told by grandparents. Film can capture these forms of memory and carry them into another generation.

This is particularly significant in frozen conflicts, where political negotiations may remain blocked for decades. When institutions cannot move, culture sometimes continues moving. Artists can cross borders that politicians cannot. Films can circulate where official dialogue is suspended. Audiences can encounter voices they might never meet in everyday life.

There is, of course, nothing automatically peaceful about art. Cinema can reinforce stereotypes, romanticize violence or reproduce nationalist myths just as easily as it can challenge them. A film is not a peacebuilding tool simply because it deals with war. Its effect depends on how it is produced, distributed, discussed and received.

Perhaps this is why the most interesting role of cinema in peacebuilding is not to provide answers. It is to make certain questions harder to avoid.

What does the other side remember? What have we forgotten? Which stories were never recorded? Can someone be an enemy in history but a human being on screen?

Peacebuilding ultimately asks societies to imagine a future different from their past. Film is one of the places where that imagination can begin.