Unearthing Memories of Global Solidarity
An exhibition organized by the Center for Advanced Research in Global Communication explored decolonial movements of the 60s and 70s.
Still from “A Non-Coincidental Mirror” (2024) by Carmen Amengual. Courtesy of the artist.
In the theater at Public Trust, just blocks from the Center for Advanced Research in Global Communication (CARGC) at the Annenberg School for Communication, an audience watched a meditation on the 1973 Third World Filmmakers Meeting in Algiers. Onscreen, filmmaker Carmen Amengual rifled through her mother’s archives, reading letters about her involvement in the Meeting — an effort to build solidarity between Asian, African, and Latin American filmmakers and define how cinema fits into the political struggle of the so-called Third World.
Amengual’s film, “A Non-Coincidental Mirror,” is one of several multimedia works included in CARGC’s recent exhibition at Public Trust. Entitled “Non-Aligned Visions,” the exhibit is a collection of contemporary artistic explorations of 1960s and 1970s transnational movements inspired by the Non-Aligned Movement, an alliance across the Global South aimed to facilitate equality across political, economic, and cultural arenas.
“The artists featured in this exhibit use forgotten archives as living resources for contemporary political imagination,” says co-curator Sima Kokotović, a postdoctoral fellow at CARGC who studies the Non-Aligned Movement’s media initiatives. “By reminding us of the work that decolonial movements did to build a more equitable world, the artwork in the exhibit provides a sense of hope that we can build new movements and make greater progress now.”Works in the exhibit not only explore the Third World Filmmakers Meeting, but also the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC), the first oil alliance between oil-producing countries of the Global South; the formation of the United Arab Republic in 1958 and the Pan-Arabist philosophy of Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser; and the intertwined anti-colonial struggles of India and Africa under Portuguese rule.
Presented in partnership with the Visible Evidence conference and Penn’s Department of Cinema & Media Studies, "Non-Aligned Visions" features four films: Amengual’s “A Non-Coincidental Mirror,” Essa Grayeb’s “The Return of Osiris,” Suneil Sanzgiri’s “Two Refusals (Would We Recognize Ourselves Unbroken?)" and Sanaz Sohrabi’s "An Incomplete Calendar," along with archival materials.
Over two nights, Amengual, Grayeb, Sanzgiri, and Sohrabi screened and discussed their work with Kokotović and co-curator Eszter Zimanyi, CARGC’s Research Director.
At the exhibit’s opening, Grayeb screened a clip of his film that reconstructs President Gamal Abdel Nasser’s 1967 resignation speech through meticulous editing of Egyptian films and television series produced between 1976 and 2016. This speech marked the symbolic collapse of Pan-Arabism for many people, he noted, and the work questions how defeat and resilience can coexist in memory. Grayeb spoke about how seeing Nasser’s portrait on walls in Arab homes, both in films and in reality, was a constant of his youth and a part of what inspired him to explore Pan-Arabism and its visual artifacts.
While showing clips of his film, Suneil Sanzgiri spoke of his time investigating his family’s legacy of resistance in Goa, India — learning about his father’s youth in a Portuguese school in Goa, his grandmother’s legacy of freedom fighting, and becoming enamored with the story of Sita Valles, a political activist who was born in Angola to Goan parents. His film "Two Refusals (Would We Recognize Ourselves Unbroken?)" explores the intertwined anti-colonial struggles of Goa, Mozambique, Angola, and Guinea-Bissau, all former Portuguese colonies, through the story of a woman haunted by Adamastor, a storm cloud titan from Portuguese mythology.
After showing her film, Amengual spoke of the lengths filmmakers went to organize the 1973 Third World Filmmakers Meeting in Algiers and the 1974 meeting in Buenos Aires. Her work not only explores her mother’s archives, but also seeks to reconstruct an unfinished documentary once envisioned by the Meetings’ organizers, she said.
At a separate screening, artist-scholar Sanaz Sohrabi shared her feature-length film-in-progress, “An Incomplete Calendar,” which explores the formation of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) in 1960. Sohrabi draws on archival examples such as promotional films, newsreels, and even a choral record produced by OPEC to chart how diverse cultures were connected through the desire to have oil sovereignty. She discussed traveling to the Central University of Venezuela to speak with former members of the university’s concert choir who performed on the 1980 record, “Rhymes and Songs for OPEC,” a multilanguage musical representation of OPEC’s member states.
Kokotović and Zimanyi were moved by the reactions the exhibit prompted — how the exhibit not only connected artistic projects across borders, but also encouraged visitors to consider how these transnational solidarities have shaped the world we live in.
“The exhibit doesn’t just document what happened; it insists on what remains possible,” says Zimanyi. “If the twentieth century’s decolonial movements sought to build a more equitable world, these films remind us that the work of creating that world remains unfinished.”
"Non-Aligned Visions" was on display at Public Trust from August to October, 2025.
