Send message to Contributor

Contribution short abstract:

This presentation explores Eastern visual strategies in solidarity with liberation movements, and their reverberations in todays’ visual memories of the struggles for liberation, in the case study of the collaboration that the Yugoslav state-run newsreel Filmske novosti established with FRELIMO.

Contribution long abstract:

This presentation explores Eastern visual strategies in solidarity with liberation movements, and their reverberations in todays’ visual memories of the struggles for liberation, in the case study of the collaboration established between the Yugoslav state-run newsreel Filmske Novosti and FRELIMO. In so doing, I collate the sources I found at the very understudied archives of FRELIMO, hosted in Maputo, and the archives of some of FRELIMO's main solidarity movements (mostly at ACOA archives, in New Orleans, and the archives of the Dutch Angola Committee (AC) in Amsterdam), with the research published by visual historians R. Vučetić and M. Turajlić, based on Filmske novosti's archives in Belgrade. From Filmske novosti's collaboration resulted one of FRELIMO’s most known documentary films: Venceremos (Popovik, 1967). This film was later widely used as the main supplier of stock images to the humanitarian propaganda produced by some of the main western solidarity movements to FRELIMO. Additionally, Filmkse novosti also trained Jose Soares in Belgrade. He was FRELIMO’s main camera man, and head of the little-known team of guerrilla-photographers of FRELIMO’s Department of Information and Propaganda. In 1975, when FRELIMO won state power, a Filmkse novosti’s team went back to Tanzania to film two of the most emblematic documentary films about Mozambique’s independence. Widely distributed at the Mozambican television, these Yugoslav made films are crucial part of the visual memory of FRELIMO’s struggle today.