When cinema was a weapon

Zineb Sedira: When words fall silent, cinema speaks
13 May 2026 – 17 January 2027
Tate Britain, Duveen Galleries, London, UK

A mobile cinema designed to circulate political ideas now stands inside Tate Britain. Nearby, a Parisian café evokes the Algerian political culture of the 1960s and 1970s, inviting you to sit down, listen to music and leaf through books on political cinema. Across the monumental Duveen Galleries, Zineb Sedira has created something that feels less like an exhibition than a journey into the cinema of Africa and the wider Global South in the 1960s and 1970s, with Algeria as a crucial centre of political and cultural exchange.

It is seductive. There is something intoxicating about stepping into a world in which cinema was not simply entertainment or an art form, but a means of political action. Sedira takes us back to the years surrounding Algerian independence, when filmmakers across the Global South were using cinema to challenge colonial narratives, mobilise audiences and imagine new societies. Sedira returns to this period not simply to commemorate it, but to examine what made cinema such a potent vehicle for political imagination.

The question, however, is not simply whether cinema once had the power to change the world. It is whether that power can still be recovered today.

The late 1950s and 1960s saw a wave of African nations win independence from European colonial rule. Algeria broke from France in 1962 and quickly became a hub for activist filmmakers from Africa, Asia, South and Central America, who used cinema to circulate political ideas.

In the final space, Sedira recreates a Ciné-Pop mobile cinema van, recalling the French army’s wartime projection units that distributed propaganda in Algeria before being reappropriated by the independent state to bring anti-colonial films to rural audiences.

This was my favourite work in the exhibition. Perhaps it was the memory of summer open-air cinemas, where the magic of cinema can happen almost anywhere. There is something about watching a film outside the conventional auditorium that makes the experience feel both immediate and transportive: you are physically somewhere else, yet the screen opens a space for the imagination to travel. Sedira’s mobile cinema captures that possibility. It reminds us that cinema does not depend on a particular architecture to create a shared sensory experience, and that its power can begin simply with the act of gathering somewhere to watch, listen and imagine.

Founded in 1965, La Cinémathèque Algérienne became a crucial centre for the preservation and circulation of cinema, attracting filmmakers from across the Global South and turning Algiers into an important meeting point for radical film culture. Sedira uses it as a starting point to explore the range of stories African cinema has brought to light, and how film can shape new ways of seeing.

The setting adds another layer. Sedira’s reconstruction of anti-colonial film culture unfolds inside Tate Britain’s monumental Duveen Galleries, bringing a history of resistance into one of Britain’s foremost cultural institutions. The context inevitably changes how we encounter it.

In the middle of the exhibition, we enter an evocation of an Algerian café in 1970s Paris: political resistance transformed into an art-world atmosphere, complete with jukebox, books, wine and couscous. It becomes almost too seductive. Yet perhaps this seduction is part of Sedira’s strategy. Memory is never neutral. She does not reconstruct the past through historical documents alone, but through its atmosphere, asking us to experience memory through objects, sounds, textures and desires.

Born in Paris in 1963 to Algerian parents, Sedira moved to London in 1986. Her practice spans photography, film, installation and performance, connecting personal and family histories with questions of migration, memory and geopolitical change. In 2022, she represented France at the 59th Venice Biennale with Dreams Have No Titles, an installation that similarly drew on militant cinema, migration and her family’s history. Drawing on family archives, the Algerian diaspora and the history of cinema, Sedira connects the political with the personal, questioning dominant historical narratives through the experience of memory and displacement.

Perhaps this is what Sedira ultimately asks us to recover: not the cinema itself, but the collective imagination that gathered around it. Cinema mattered because it gave people somewhere to meet, something to debate and images through which to imagine another future. Today, those images circulate through our phones, fragmented across platforms and algorithms. The medium has changed. The question is whether we have retained the capacity to turn images into collective action.