The Non-Aligned Film Archives is an ongoing project curated by researchers and archivists Léa Morin and Annabelle Aventurin in collaboration with Open City Documentary Film Festival. The project aims to create a space to share films that have been marginalised from dominant cinematic narratives. Each session revolves around a single lost work that is instead invoked through other films that have survived.

‘The inspiration of this programme is a censored documentary by Algerian filmmaker Farouk Beloufa: Insurrectionnelle (1972). The chosen films therefore act together as an invocation and a reconstruction of Beloufa’s unfinished work. Concerned with speaking out against colonial and/or capitalist violence, Santiago Alvarez, Ahmed Bouanani, Assia Djebar and Nadir Bouhmouch attempt to reappropriate identities and narratives in opposition to an exoticizing colonial gaze. They share a commitment to speaking from the people’s perspective. This desire to establish a popular narrative, in opposition to official histories, exposed their work to censorship, marginalisation and even erasure. 

These experimental essay films act as poetic and political audio-visual pamphlets that utilise the weapons of cinema to fight against colonialism, authoritarian regimes seeking to impose a unified narrative, and the resulting social injustices. In the face of this violence, the filmmakers present a cinema of evocations, sensations and audio-visual experiences that summon the traces of a silent popular memory and the breath of a possible insurrection.’
– Léa Morin and Annabelle Aventurin

Find out more about the Non-Aligned Archives and the films in this programme here