Any traveller delving into the history of the Balkan region is soon confronted with an investigation of a past strewn with conflicting narratives, interconnected identities, and displaced images. Traversing the geographical and imaginary landscape of the Balkans has been an existential endeavour for me: a journey between memory and history, myth and reality, affect and vision, divisive politics and common contours. In Theo Angelopoulos's acclaimed film To Vlemma tou Odyssea/Ulysses’ Gaze (1995), the exiled film director A. returns to the region in search of a lost film reel shot by the Balkan cinema pioneers, as the last vestiges of the Cold War world order are crumbling, to eventually end his trip in war-torn Sarajevo. A's quest ends amidst the ruins of Yugoslav wars, where my own journey begins, to become part of other global stories of emigration and displacement. This work, then, symbolizes my return to the Balkans, both figuratively and physically. The Bulgarian writer Kapka Kassabova warns: ‘To journey to the place of your ancestors, you must be prepared to see what it is easier to deny’ (2020, 1). In the early 1990s, the destruction of former Yugoslavia metaphorically entailed a search for a new or a desired identity and a rewriting and reconstruction of the past. Angelopoulos's film foregrounds the obsession and the desire to locate the beginning (the arche), an ‘innocence lost’ in the Balkans, through the search for the missing film reel that might provide an answer to the, then, current state of things, while the Manakia brothers, as Balkan cinema pioneers par excellence, come to symbolize and represent the loss of the ability to be together.