THE OPINION OF THE “WORLD” – WHY NOT
Five years later The other side of a story (2018), which retraced fifty years of Serbian history from a family apartment nationalized under Tito, documentary filmmaker Mila Turajlic returns with a diptych resulting from an unusual exploration, a dive into the archives of a disappeared country, namely the former Yugoslavia. In Belgrade, in the premises of Filmske Novosti, thousands of sleeper reels are stored, containing official Yugoslav news, broadcast in cinemas in advance until 1989 and which have shaped the political imagination of the country.
In the first part (Unaligned), the director finds images of an event that has disappeared from memory: the Belgrade conference which, from 1er on September 6, 1961, brought together in the capital the heads of so-called “non-aligned” states, insubordinate to the two blocs opposed by the Cold War. By receiving this forum of twenty-five countries (the images show Nehru, Nasser, Soekarno, Haïle Selassie and Modibo Keïta crossing the steps of Parliament), Tito placed Yugoslavia in an original third way, with no future in bipolarized Europe, but pioneering, because it gave the Third World a scene to match, endorsed the decolonization process and outlined what we would today call the Global South.
Revolutionary operator and brother-in-arms
By digging through the archives, Mila Turajlic discovers the importance of an operator, Stevan Labudovic, a cameraman attracted by President Tito, who accompanied him on all his international trips – today a 90-year-old man still living in Belgrade, whom the director confronts her own images. Cinema-Guerrillasthe second part of the diptych, focuses more particularly on the stay he made in Algeria, between 1959 and 1962, “loaned” by Tito to the National Liberation Army, a branch of the FLN, to document and broadcast his battles, and oppose his images to the leaden screed of French diplomacy.
Labudovic became the brother-in-arms of the revolutionaries, and a historical figure of Algerian liberation, still celebrated today in national museums. The unexpected axis traced throughout archives between Yugoslavia and Algeria makes it possible to re-examine the conflict from a new angle, and to finally get it out of the ruts undermined by the Franco-Algerian debate. The images filmed by Labudovic on the training and operations of the FLN, little known, offer a choice document: the faces of the very young fighters, promoted very early to the ranks of command, the transmission of gestures, the movements in the heart of the territory.
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