What do the Algerian war of liberation and Yugoslavia have in common? Stevan Labudović. In 1959, Tito himself sent his favourite cinematographer to Algeria. The resistance against the French colonial rule needed the eyes of the world, and the experienced partisan Labudović helped open them: His images gave the lie to the propaganda of the occupiers and their Western allies. This is a portrait of the man, the mission and the age – as film, ideological and personal history.

For three years, until the Democratic Republic of Algeria was proclaimed, Labudović put himself and his camera at the service of the people fighting for independence. Mila Turajlić found the newsreel footage shot at the time in the Filmske Novosti archive in Belgrade, got in touch with the aged pensioner and followed his trail. From a wealth of archive material, diary entries by and interviews with Labudović, with contemporary witnesses from Yugoslavia, Algeria and New York, where the young Maghreb state, like many other former colonies, struggled for admission to the United Nations, she distils the promising origins of an alliance that stood at the beginning of the Non-Aligned Movement, which was to oppose the dichotomy of the superpowers. Thus the bow to her compatriot also gains global political topicality.

To the film enthusiast Marshall Tito, who had his own projection room and employed a full-time projectionist, cinema was also a means to consolidate socialist Yugoslavia. Filmmaker Mila Turajlić, on the other hand, raised in a state that was falling apart, draws on the wealth and glamour of Yugoslavian cinematography in her first long film to better understand her own history. In a clever montage of interviews and film clips, she tells stories of nation-building and images of a nation, but also of how the collapse of the film industry after Tito’s death heralded the collapse of her country.

In Hamsterland, everybody is 100 percent happy. Their religion is statistics and the perfect employee is young, a team player and stress-resistant. Even the most mindless computer jobs and piece work drudgery are fun, without exception. Until one day something goes wrong after all and the mantras “think positive” and “follow your dreams” are temporarily silenced. An entertaining polemic on hyper capitalist, neoliberal societies that makes you smile.

Dragica does not lack for work. The house and cattle in western Serbia demand toil from dawn to dusk. She milks, harvests, prepares porridge for her handicapped daughter. Her own mother recently passed away. Now Dragica wears black and shaves her old father. Can there be an alternative to this daily self-sacrifice? Almost casually, Isaac Knights-Washbourn leaves space for such reflections: While chopping tomatoes, the woman opens up to a guest from town.

A door that has been closed for seventy years serves as a MacGuffin in Mila Turajlić’s double portrait of her mother and her mother country of Yugoslavia. That very door has divided the bourgeois family apartment ever since Tito’s communists assigned several rooms to proletarians in need of shelter. Srbijanka Turajlić never cared a fig for her neighbours. But when Serbian nationalists began to threaten the unity of her country, she turned into a fierce opponent of the Milošević regime. In a virtuoso montage of archive material and conversations with her mother, the filmmaker recaps the latter’s development while gaining a new perspective on the time of her own youth.