The Battle of Algiers

This three-part militant essay weaponizes montage the way Pontecorvo weaponizes reenactment, turning the cinema itself into a cell of agitation against neocolonial economies. Its insistence on pausing for the viewer to debate transforms the screen into the same kind of contested civic space the casbah occupies in Algiers.

Fahdel's domestic chronicle of his family before and after the 2003 invasion documents occupation at the granular scale of bread queues and television static, the same intimate scale at which Pontecorvo measured the FLN's neighborhood logistics. Both works refuse the helicopter view, insisting that empire is best indicted from the kitchen table.

Andrić's chronicle of an Ottoman bridge across centuries reads imperial structures as accumulators of memory, where every paving stone holds an impalement, a wedding, or a bomb. Like Pontecorvo, he refuses the single hero and instead treats the city itself as the protagonist of occupation.

This collaboration grafts Bantu liturgical chant onto Bach cantatas, staging the colonial encounter as a contrapuntal negotiation rather than a conquest, where neither voice is allowed to absorb the other. The work parallels Pontecorvo's score with Morricone, in which European orchestration and Algerian percussion refuse to resolve into a single key.

Though aimed at children, this Belgrade-produced animation hides a quietly anti-imperial parable about a girl crossing into a hidden world that adults have agreed not to see, a structure that maps onto the parallel city the FLN built beneath French Algiers. Its hand-drawn density gives weight to thresholds and roof-crossings the way Pontecorvo gives weight to staircases and checkpoints.