Mila Turajlić: Non-Aligned Newsreels: Fragments from the Debris 

a live documentary performance 

In the context of Summer school Our Many Easts Mila Turajlić invites the audience into a process of confronting archival material which has fallen out of political narratives. The starting point is the recovery of a cache of reels kept in the vaults of Yugoslav Newsreels, filmed by their cameramen across the non-aligned world from the 1950s through the 1970s – within the ranks of the Algerian Liberation Movement and FRELIMO, for newly-independent countries such as Mali and Tanzania, at Non-Aligned Summits. Integrating this “resurfaced” footage with oral histories, sound recordings and personal archives into a confessional speculation, Turajlić performs the challenges of giving voice to unfulfilled political projects. The live “excavation” opens a space where she and the audience journey together, exploring the poetics of the fragmentary.  

Mila Turajlić, born in Belgrade, Yugoslavia, is an award-winning filmmaker and archive “artivist” whose works include Cinema Komunisto (2010) and the IDFA award-winning The Other Side of Everything (2017). Her most recent documentary diptych, Non-Aligned & Ciné-Guerrillas: Scenes from the Labudović Reels (2022), was described by The New York Times as “a visually arresting inquiry into what it takes to envision a new world.” She is the founder of the Non-Aligned Newsreels project (nonalignednewsreels.com), an artistic exploration of the “orphaned” status of the film archives curated by Yugoslavia in a gesture of “ciné-solidarity” with the non-aligned world. Performative and video iterations of the project have been curated for IDFA on Stage, international exhibitions (MoMA) and biennales (Berlin 2022, Sharjah 2025). In 2020 Turajlić was invited to join the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (Oscars) Documentary Branch.