Forgotten Soviet Film Archive in Amman Reveals Propaganda Ties to Vietnam and Arab Solidarity

In 2014, a trove of over 900 film canisters in 16mm and 35mm formats was discovered in a storage locker in Amman, Jordan. These films, exported from Russia to Jordan from the late 1960s to early 1990s via Soviet cultural exchange, include propaganda works emphasizing relations between Vietnam, Russia, and political struggles in the Arab Middle East. Despite recent state-imposed restrictions on researcher access, work on the archive persists. The essay, published in ARTMargins Volume 9, Issue 2 in June 2020, treats the archive as a single transnational film history object rather than individual works, highlighting its role as a cohesive geopolitical idea shaped by the Vietnam-American War and Palestinian liberation. It argues the archive was conceptually formed in the 1960s-70s, with Vietnam's influence on Third World solidarity movements central to its imaginative geography. The content is subscription-only via MIT Press, with the article authored by Brynn Hatton and published on July 5, 2020.