COMBAT BREATHING: PERPETUAL RECURRENCES, PART 1: CINÉ-GUERRILLAS (2022)
Directed by Mila Turajlić
94 minutes
Based on resurrected 35mm footage shot by Stevan Labudović, the official cameraman of former Yugoslav President Tito, this documentary by Mila Turajlić takes viewers on an archival road trip through the insurgent historical streams and collaborative Third World networks that constituted and sustained the Algerian anti-colonial struggle from 1954-62. Turajlić follows Labudović's work in Algeria through intimate interviews with him and Algerian revolutionary contemporaries, matching his newsreel footage – audiovisual testaments to tricontinental solidarity – with excerpts from his diary. Employing only images of the Algerian War not shown from a French perspective, CINÉ-GUERRILLAS wades through the media and propaganda battle that played out during the liberation struggle, where cinema was mobilized as a political weapon of resistance against colonialism and empire as well as a social, imaginative medium of world-making.