Quebec Premiere

Non-Aligned: Scenes from the Labudovic Reels

Serbian archive reels unveil anti-imperialist struggles and the Non-Aligned Movement. Mila Turajlic meets filmmaker Stevan Labudovic to unveil these forgotten images and their global political impact. 

SYNOPSIS

Reels of film sleep on archive shelves in Serbia, filled with forgotten images of popular celebrations, political summits, and sometimes anti-colonial armed struggles worldwide. Mila Turajlic unearths them one by one, meeting the man behind the camera: Stevan Labudovic. From 1954, from Belgrade to Algiers to New York, this passionate filmmaker captured, on behalf of Tito and ex-Yugoslavia, anti-imperialist struggles and opposition to the idea of a binary world divided between East and West. His images narrate the emergence of the "Third World" on the international stage and a political utopia: the Non-Aligned Movement. A time when cinema was believed to be able to write history.

Theme(s): , Democracy, Politics, Sociology

DETAILS

Director | , Mila Turajlic
Year | , 2023
Country | , France, Serbia
Duration | 100 minutes
Original language | , Arabic, English, French, Serbian
Subtitles | , French
Image | Mila Turajlic
Sound | Aleksandar Protic
Editing | Céline Ducreux, Mila Turajlic, Sylvie Gadmer

DIRECTOR

Photo

Mila Turajlic

SEE COMPLETE PROFILE

Mila Turajlic, born in Belgrade, Yugoslavia, is a filmmaker and visual artist whose documentary works rely on a combination of oral histories, film archives, and found footage to create a new reflexive language that confronts memory with political and historical narratives being erased. Her most recent project, the documentary diptych Scenes from the Labudovic Archives – a road trip through the birth of the Third World project – premiered at TIFF and IDFA in fall 2022. Her film The Other Side of Everything (2017) was HBO Europe's first coproduction with Serbia. It won 32 awards, including the Best Documentary Film award at IDFA, the SCAM Award for Best Documentary in 2021, and was nominated for the European Parliament's LUX Prize. Mila's first feature documentary, Cinema Komunisto (2011), screened at over 100 festivals and won 16 awards, including the Gold Hugo at the Chicago International Film Festival and the FOCAL Award for Creative Use of Archival Footage. In 2018, she was commissioned by MoMA in New York to create archival-based video installations for their flagship exhibition on Yugoslav modernist architecture. Works from her long-term artistic research project Non-Aligned: Scenes from the Labudovic Archives were commissioned for the 2022 Berlin Biennale and exhibited internationally. Mila has received fellowships from Columbia University's Ideas and Imagination Fellowship, as well as artist grants from the Sharjah Foundation and Chicken & Egg. She is a co-founder and former chair of the board of DOKSerbia, the association of Serbian documentary filmmakers. In 2020, Mila was invited to join the documentary branch of the AMPAS (Oscars). She was named a Knight of the Order of Arts and Letters by the French government in 2022.

CAREER

BIDF - Budapest International Documentary Film Festival • Trieste Film Festival • Hot Docs - Canadian International Documentary Festival • DOK.fest München • CPH:DOX - Copenhagen International Documentary Film Festival • Festival La Rochelle Cinéma • États généraux du film documentaire • Sarajevo Film Festival • IDFA - International Documentary Festival Amsterdam

PAST SCREENINGS

SCREENING 1

8 July 2024 at 21h10

Parc Dante

A discussion with Rachad Antonious, Associate Professor (Retired Full Professor) in the Department of Sociology at the Université du Québec à Montréal, will follow the screening.

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