Image: Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus
‘Non-Aligned Newsreels: Fragments from the Debris’ is set for its Ohio premiere on October 23, 2026, at 4:30 p.m. in the Film/Video Theater, with Mila Turajlić in person. The program is approximately 70 minutes long and uses digital video.
The presentation is a live performance examining a trove of forgotten Yugoslav newsreels that Turajlić encountered in her hometown of Belgrade. The work engages with newsreel footage filmed in the wake of political crisis and upheaval to follow the development of the Non-Aligned Movement, the political alliance forged between young nations that sided with neither the United States nor the Soviet Union during the Cold War.
Turajlić weaves together newsreels from Algeria, Mali, Mozambique, and Tanzania in a hybrid film-performance-lecture that poetically traces the networks of solidarity formed between the former Yugoslavia and nations in the throes of decolonial revolutionary struggle. With profound reverence for the footage, people, and histories encountered in the archive, she honors the role of the moving image in building global revolutionary movements.
Turajlić is the founder of the Non-Aligned Newsreels research project, an artistic exploration of the orphaned status of film archives made by Yugoslavia in a gesture of “ciné-solidarity” with the non-aligned world. She describes working with archives as “an act of resistance against erasure,” saying that her work creates an archive that she hopes will allow her generation and future generations to know their stories.
