Ciné-Guerrillas: Scenes From the Labudović Reels

In 1959, Tito, the President of Yugoslavia, sent his cameraman Stevan Labudović to Algeria during the War of Independence. His mission was to film the opposition, the resistance against French colonial domination. Serbian filmmaker Mila Turajlić (The Other Side of Everything, VdR 2018) has delved into Labudović’s archives: a dark room where hundreds of reels of 35 mm film are stored. Together with Labudović – now an old man who does his best to keep up with the energetic director – she reconstructs what he lived 50 years ago, using these hitherto unseen images shot at the time. The story that emerges is unique: these are the only images of the conflict that were not produced as a means of propaganda by the occupying forces and their Western allies. At once an adventure film set in war times, an intimate portrait of an intergenerational friendship journeying through memory, and a historical account of a little-known opposition movement, Ciné-Guerrillas: Scenes From the Labudović Reels is about the power of images as vectors of forgotten stories and close friendships, and an organising tool for power.

Madeline Robert