Nadia Ouiddar
June 13, 2024 at 2:49 p.m.
There Serbian filmmaker dive into the archives of Labudovic : a room without light where hundreds of reels of 35 mm film are stored. She exhumes them one by one. These news images are never before seen. They recount moments of popular jubilation, political summits and, sometimes, anti-colonial armed struggles across the world. Mila Turajlic recomposes an epic and tells a unique story. These two films show how the cinematographic image witnessed the emergence of a political project. “Non-Aligned” takes us into an unprecedented archive.
From 1954, from Belgrade to Algiers via New York, Stevan Labudovic captured on film the anti-imperialist struggles and the opposition to the idea of a bipolar world shared between East and West. His images tell the story of the emergence of the “Third World” on the international scene and a political utopia: the Non-Aligned movement. A time when we believed that cinema could write history.
Second part of the film diptych “Scenes from the Labudović archives”, “Ciné-guerillas” focuses more specifically on the images produced by Stevan Labudović on the side of the FLN, with the support of the former Yugoslavia, in order to counter French propaganda films during the Algerian war of independence. The film returns to the role and production conditions of these still little-known images.
