Two Meetings and a Funeral

“The Third World was not a place, but a project.” (Vijay Prashad, The Darker Nations, 2007). This was to be a utopian alliance where the Global South would reconfigure planetary leadership, ending Euro-American dominance. The Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) attempted to navigate a “third way,” but parallel participation in the Petrodollar-driven “Islamic bloc” by some member countries shredded fragile coalitions behind the scenes. Two Meetings and a Funeral explores a “pivot” moment between the 1973 Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) meeting in Algeria and the 1974 Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) meeting in Pakistan. The unraveling of old alliances began from a barely discernible venn diagram overlap between these two groups, one that would taken on world significance after the OPEC oil crisis, the Iranian revolution, and the invasion of Afghanistan. Traveling through the residues of transnational architecture (Niemeyer, Moretti, Le Corbusier) in New York, Algiers, and Dhaka, the film considers the erosion of the idea of the Third World as a potential space for decolonisation, and an always imperfect understanding of Socialism. Conversations between Vijay Prashad, Samia Zennadi, Atef Berredjem, Amirul Islam, and Zonayed Saki look at the contradictions of decolonization movements that never remembered to liberate their own leadership.