In CINÉ-GUERRILLAS: SCENES FROM THE LABUDOVIĆ REELS director Mila 
Turajlić follows Labudović’s work in Algeria through 
intimate interviews with him and his revolutionary contemporaries, as well as through his newsreel footage, which she matches up with excerpts from his diary. Known as the finest cameraman in Yugoslavia, he was handpicked in 1960 by Yugoslav President Josep Broz Tito to support the Algerian anti-colonial effort, in part because he saw parallels between the Algerian resistance and the Yugoslav partisans’ fight against 
Nazi occupiers in WWII. Labudović’s mission: to make films countering French propaganda. Labudović lived with the Algerian fighters, filming them as they traveled through the mountains, sometimes engaging in sabotage. No impartial observer, 
he brought along newsreel footage of the Yugoslav resistance to raise morale. And, unlike others covering the war, the Algerians trusted him totally. CINÉ-GUERRILLAS: SCENES FROM THE LABUDOVIĆ REELS is a testament to international solidarity, and to the power of images in the fight for decolonization.
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About the filmmaker – Mila Turajlic is a documentary filmmaker born in Belgrade, Yugoslavia. Her most recent film The Other Side of Everything premiered at the Toronto IFF in 2017, and went on to win 32 awards including the prestigious IDFA Award for Best Documentary Film. It was a New York Times Critics’ Pick, and was named one of the best films of 2018 by TheNew Yorker’s Richard Brody. The film was HBO Europe’s first co-production with Serbia, and had a record-breaking theatrical release in Serbia. Mila’s debut documentary film Cinema Komunisto, premiered at IDFA and the Tribeca Film Festival, and went on to win 16 awards including the Gold Hugo at the Chicago Int’l Film Festival in 2011, and the FOCAL Award for Creative Use of Archival Footage. Theatrically released in France, UK, Italy, Slovenia, Croatia and Serbia, “Cinema Komunisto” was broadcast across Europe. She is currently in post-production on the documentary diptych Scenes from the Labudović Reels: Non-Aligned and Ciné-Guerrillas. In 2018 she was commissioned by MoMA in New York to create a series of archive-based video installations for their landmark exhibition on Yugoslav modernist architecture. In 2020 Mila was awarded a Fellowship at Columbia University’s Institute for Ideas & Imagination to pursue her long-term artistic research project Non-Aligned Newsreels, a deep-dive into the archival materials resulting from Yugoslavia’s ciné-collaborations with the decolonizing world. She is a founding member of DOKSerbia, the Association of documentary filmmakers of Serbia, and served as the first President of the Board. Mila is a member of the TED Fellows 2021 cohort.
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CINÉ-GUERRILLAS: SCENES FROM THE LABUDOVIĆ REELS reviews:
“A documentary based on an inherently fascinating subject for those looking for something at the intersection of secret film history and Cold War artefacts.” – Filmmaker Magazine
“Prize-winning director Mila Turajlic unearths a fascinating lost chapter in Cold War history in this archive-heavy documentary.” – The Film Verdict
“This film is a tribute to a man who was directly involved with the FLN and shows a rare inside viewpoint on an historical event.” – Educational Media Reviews Online