Non-Aligned Newsreels: Fragments from the Debris

Mila Turajlić is coming to the Wexner Center for the Arts on Friday, October 23, to present Non-Aligned Newsreels: Fragments from the Debris (2023–ongoing). It's an Ohio premiere, and she'll be there in person, which is the key to the whole thing: it's a hybrid film-performance-lecture, not just a screening. She'll be weaving together newsreel footage from Algeria, Mali, Mozambique, and Tanzania to trace the networks of solidarity that formed between the former Yugoslavia and nations in the middle of decolonial revolutionary struggle.

That solidarity grew out of the Non-Aligned Movement, the alliance of young states that sided with neither the US nor the Soviet Union during the Cold War. The performance itself started when Turajlić came across a trove of forgotten Yugoslav newsreels in her hometown of Belgrade. She founded the Non-Aligned Newsreels research project to look into the orphaned status of the films Yugoslavia made as a gesture of 'ciné-solidarity' with the non-aligned world—footage that was meant to document those connections but ended up sitting in archives.

Turajlić is an award-winning filmmaker and archive 'artivist' whose previous work includes Cinema Komunisto (2010) and the IDFA winner The Other Side of Everything (2017). This piece is part of Unorthodocs 2026, the Wexner Center's tenth annual festival of creative nonfiction filmmaking, and it also falls under the 2026 FotoFocus Biennial: The Long View.

It runs about 70 minutes in the Film/Video Theater at the Wexner Center, 1871 N. High Street, starting at 4:30 PM. Admission is free for all audiences with a ticket.