WORKS
Fragments from Algiers 

2019 


Carmen Amengual, Fragments from Algiers, 2019. Super 8 to digital, 4:52 min.




Carmen Amengual, Fragments from Algiers, 2019. Super 8 to digital, 4:52 min.





Carmen Amengual, Fragments from Algiers, 2019. Super 8 to digital, 4:52 min.


Fragments from Algiers (2019) is a four-minute Super 8 film that stemmed from an encounter with my mother’s archive from her year in Algeria in the 1970s.

This piece inaugurated my multi-year research-based project about the first Third World Filmmakers Meeting, held in Algiers in 1973.

The work does not attempt to reconstruct history in a linear sense, but to reactivate the textures of what was left behind: folded letters, envelopes, official stamps, credentials, photographs, and clippings.
Filmed in black and white, the camera hovers and moves restlessly across these surfaces, too quickly to permit reading, privileging material presence over informational content.

The archive is treated less as evidence than as a living field of affect and memory. A single letter, subtitled on screen, anchors the work: a note from filmmakers Jorge Giannoni and Susana Sichel in 1974. Writing from Buenos Aires, they describe the challenges of sustaining the momentum of the Third World Filmmakers Meeting held in Algiers the previous year. The correspondence evokes a larger collective project: an unfinished documentary on anti-colonial struggles that my mother was meant to help realize, but which never came to be.