We explore how Third World Newsreel's Newsreel Retrospective and new film True North keep marginalised histories alive in the film archive.
Archive footage remains a vital tool for documentary filmmaking. The grainy, flickering imagery can lend the story historicity and evidentiary value or charge it with urgency and revelation. The archive has served as a framework for nations to consolidate an ‘official’ history that supports their master narrative and affirms hegemonic power. National archives are ideologically connected to the idea of nationhood: they play a role in fostering national identity by preserving records documenting shared customs, social norms, and cultural expressions.
Many histories are excluded or silenced by institutional archives, putting them at risk of erasure. The radical documentary True North and the short documentaries restored by Third World Newsreel challenge this fate, offering a counter archive of black activism in America and the global solidarity of the black liberation movement.
Third World Newsreel
In the late 1960s, when the US was simmering with activism in social movements backed by anti-imperialist and anti-war sentiments. Third World Newsreel was formed by a handful of New York filmmaking co-ops disillusioned with the mainstream media’s coverage of such events. The label Third World was borrowed from the radical Latin American militant film manifesto ‘Towards a Third Cinema’, which conceived cinema as a tool to decolonise Latin American film culture and raise consciousness for cultural liberation. Third World Newsreel similarly aimed to unify social justice struggles across the globe, like the Caribbean, South America, and Africa. It operated as a counter-media outlet, reporting on events such as the 1968 Columbia University student rebellion.
Their radical distribution network was a crucial part of their militant production, circulating documentaries in libraries, schools and churches to enable grassroots activism. As an extension of this, Third World Newsreel ran workshops and camera training for women and people of colour who had limited access to resources. They opened the Higher Ground Cinema in New York to nurture a space for political education and activism. Their dedicated commitment to media for social justice has endured as a vital resource for marginalised histories, serving as a counter-archive used by documentary filmmakers today. Retrospective screenings of their early documentaries continue their original philosophy of disseminating knowledge and creating a collective experience that fosters political discourse.
We present two complementary programmes of the Third World Newsreel Retrospectives at Bertha DocHouse:
Power to the People : May Day Panther (1969), El Pueblo se Levanta (1971), Columbia Revolt (1968) screens on Sun 24 May.
Anti-Imperialism in Action: Fuera Yanqui (1970), My Country Occupied (1971), Revolution Until Victory a.k.a. We Are the Palestinian People (1973) screens on Sun 7 Jun.
True North
Michèle Stephenson’s documentary True North interrupts official historical narratives by vividly reworking archival footage of Montreal and Haiti to explore black experiences of exile and racism. The documentary returns to 1969 and the student occupation of Montreal’s Sir George Williams University to protest against systemic racism. Stephenson reclaims this history, placing the story and memories firmly into Canada’s social history. She explained in an interview with POV:
“For me, going to the archive first is about going to our humanity. Not as victims, but as full-fledged people with complicated lives where we can see ourselves. We can actually see our daily lives represented on the screen.”
For Stephenson, invisibility in the official archives denies representation and a sense of belonging in Canada, and she is committed to offering a counter narrative to expand collective memory and inclusion.
True North also articulates the power of testimony as a counter-archive, as Stephenson collects interviews with surviving participants of the 1969 student occupation. These memories constitute oral histories that cannot be written down and committed to an official archive or history book. The testimonials contribute a new perspective on Canadian history, highlighting marginalised black activism that was just as energised as the movements covered by Third World Newsreel in the US. The kinetic editing and emotive score charge the imagery with longing, displacement, anger and solidarity, reactivating the archive with emotional intensity. This documentary uses archives to safeguard vulnerable histories against erasure, to contribute to a counter-history, and to represent the black experience.
True North is screening from Fri 22 May.
Without documentary film and cinema exhibition, these stories and histories could remain dormant in the archives. The Third World Newsreel retrospective and True North show how documentary film functions as a vital tool for keeping archives alive, enabling them to endure through circulation, reinterpretation, and collective engagement within cinema spaces such as DocHouse. Third World Newsreel now serves as an archive of social justice media, a guardian of marginalised histories. Similarly, Stephenson’s documentary offers an archive of counter-memory that repairs the absence of Black Canadian history.
Both function as living archives. The significance of this cannot be overstated: living archives resist institutional exclusion because traditional archives often reproduce racial and colonial exclusions. This is why documentaries like True North and those made by Third World Newsreel matter: they keep the archive alive in the present, where exhibition itself becomes a form of preservation, allowing new meanings to be made.
Written by India Smith
Sources
Buchsbaum, Jonathan. “Militant Third World Film Distribution in the United States, 1970–1980.” Canadian Journal of Film Studies, no. 2 (2015): 51–65.
Mullen, Pat. “How True North Captures the Black Power Movement in Canada and Abroad.” POV Magazine, September 3, 2025.POV Magazine article
Renov, Michael. “Newsreel: Old and New. Towards an Historical Profile.”Film Quarterly 41, no. 1 (1987): 20–33.