The Time of the Leopards and Tensions within Non-Aligned Solidarities

• In Event: Left Perspectives on Aesthetics III: Fight Club of the Forgotten Future: Second and Third World Solidarity and Struggle on Screen

Abstract

Ten years after the Mozambican independence, The Time of the Leopards (Zdravko Velimirović, 1985) aimed to represent the country’s liberation struggle on a somewhat epic scale. For the National Film Institute, this was the first fiction film after developing capacities for post-independence revolutionary cinema mostly focused on documentaries. The Institute approached Yugoslav filmmakers, as their Non-Aligned socialist partners, for the occasion. This “socialist friendship” was riddled with tensions (Gray 2012). According to the Mozambican screenwriters, Yugoslav filmmakers disrespected their perspective and vision. Contemporary historians of Yugoslavia see the film as the final instance of the country’s failure to establish cinematic collaborations with socialist post-liberation states across the Global South (Vučetić 2017).

In my paper, I reframe this instance of cinematic solidarity by foregrounding the process of negotiation of racial, political, and cultural differences at its heart. I approach The Time of the Leopards as an example that elucidates tensions constitutive for the building of geopolitical “communitas” (Lee 2010) and “trans-affective solidarities” (Mahler 2018), and I consider insights it offers about strategies cultural producers used to overcome them. Apart from the existing sources, I rely on interviews with Camilo de Sousa and Isabel Noronha, who participated in the production of the film, as well as memoires of Zdravko Velimirović and archives of Yugoslav “Avala Film Studio,” the film’s co-producer.

Author

• Sima Kokotovic, U of Pennsylvania