Flashbacks from a Continuing Struggle

These texts by Margaret Dickinson consist of a short article written in 1979 for the journal of the UK film trade union, the ACTT, and explanatory notes written in 2010. While the main article is about the author's experiences of teaching film editing to absolute beginners in newly independent Mozambique, the notes provide background information about both Mozambique and ACTT. In the early 1970s elements within the ACTT proposed nationalisation as a solution to problems of the British film industry; the union commissioned a detailed report, which was hotly debated but then shelved. In Mozambique after independence in 1975 the government decided to develop cinema on the basis of partial nationalisation and established a national film institute, the Instituto Nacional de Cinema (INC), for the purpose. There was also a personal connection between ACTT and Mozambican cinema through the film-maker and radical thinker, Simon Hartog, who wrote the ACTT report and was subsequently employed in Mozambique to work for the INC there.