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At an Algerian museum, Serbian filmmaker Mila Turajlić is struck by an exhibit featuring an old film camera.
It belonged to a Yugoslav cameraman, celebrated as a hero in Algeria. His name is Stevan Labudović, he is 87, and he lives in Belgrade. Turajlić, from the same city, had never heard of him.
Labudović had been handpicked by Yugoslav President Josep Broz Tito to support the Algerian anti-colonial effort by making films that countered French propaganda. He lived with the Algerian fighters, filming them as they traveled through the mountains. Through intimate interviews with Labudović and his Algerian revolutionary contemporaries, along with his rediscovered newsreels, Ciné-Guerrillas plunges us into the media battle that played out during the Algerian war for independence, where cinema was mobilized as a weapon of political struggle against colonialism.
Scenes from the Labudović Reels is a documentary diptych of two feature-length films by Mila Turajlić that take us on an archival road trip through the birth of the Third World project, based on unseen 35mm materials filmed by Stevan Labudović, the cameraman of Yugoslav President Tito.
Also Playing: Non-Aligned: Scenes from the Labudović Reels