“I feel this is a time of big things happening in terms of expression here,” said Teona Strugar Mitevska, a Macedonian director whose latest film, “The Woman Who Brushed Off Her Tears,” will hit the festival circuit in early 2012. “For many years we went through wars, we made films about war but now, more and more, we are speaking of other things. We are becoming more universal in terms of the message.”

Not surprisingly, the film industry in the former Yugoslavia is vastly underfunded, so filmmakers have to rely on co-productions — not only with European partners but with regional ones as well. That has, in turn, helped promote their movies to a wider audience.

“You do not have a Serbian film any more in terms of production,” said Bojana Bandic, the artistic director of Serbia’s Cinema City International Film Festival. “There is always a part of the money, for example, from Croatia, Bosnia or Slovenia, because the only way to find enough money to make a decent film is to connect all these countries and their budgets.” Co-productions also make sense for Balkan filmmakers because some countries — like Bosnia and Macedonia — lack infrastructure, including equipment, crews and post-production facilities. Renting a camera from Serbia, doing editing in Croatia or having a star from Serbia appear in a Bosnian film have again become a normal part of filmmaking.

“We have a word in our Serbo-Croat language, ‘domace,’ which means “homemade,”’ said Daniel Rafaelic, a Croatian documentary filmmaker and historian. “This word reappeared in the last five years. You do not have in the papers anymore, ‘A new Croatian film in the cinema or a new production from Serbia.’ No, now we say a domace film.”

While this homemade industry is on an upswing, so too are foreign productions. At least for now, filming in most of the former Yugoslav countries is cheaper than filming in places like Hungary or Romania, and with Croatia and Serbia having recently passed legislation on tax rebates for foreign filmmakers, making a film in the region could become even cheaper still. (Serbia has yet to implement the law because of the economic recession.)

There are, however, still issues in some countries in terms of logistics — and bureaucracy. Bosnia does not have a cohesive strategy for luring in foreign filmmakers, which was an obvious problem last year when Ms. Jolie wanted to film in the country. Her permission to shoot in Sarajevo was briefly revoked because the subject matter of the film — about a love affair between a Serbian prison guard and a Muslim woman in a war camp — stirred up ferocious controversy. In the end, most of the film was made in Hungary, though there were still several scenes shot in Bosnia.