An Exercise in Assembling brings together fragments from militant films made across liberation struggles, anti-colonial movements, and struggles for civil, workers’ and migrants’ rights. All of the scenes show moments of public assembly: people gathering in streets, squares, factories and other shared spaces. Reassembled by Subversive Film, the fragments form four chapters that consider assembly as film, as liberation, as power and as a method or tool.

Rather than looking nostalgically at the history of militant cinema, the work asks what it means to assemble today. What can collective gathering make possible? How can cinema itself become a form of assembly, a source of collective power and a way of producing shared political imaginaries? At the same time, the work turns these questions back onto cinema: what is a militant image today, and what does it mean to make images of struggles that are not necessarily one’s own? The fragments resonate with the present, bringing together an emancipatory and hopeful horizon with moments of grief, uncertainty and defeat.

Subversive Film is a cinema research and production collective founded in 2011 by Reem Shilleh and Mohanad Yaqubi, working between Ramallah and Brussels. Their practice grows from research into militant and revolutionary cinema and combines filmmaking, archival research, film programming, editing, preservation, publishing and other forms of intervention. Rather than treating archival cinema as a fixed history, they work to reactivate films and the collective histories, memories and political possibilities they contain.