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At Home But Not At Home: Films by Suneil Sanzgiri
March 31, 2023 @ 5:00 pm - 7:00 pm
At Home But Not At Home: Films by Suneil Sanzgiri
UNC Department of Communication Visiting Filmmaker Suneil Sanzgiri will present a program of three short essay films as part of the 5th Cosmic Rays Film Festival, in collaboration with the Carolina Asia Center. Sanzgiri’s work spans experimental video and film, animation, essays, and installations, and contends with questions of identity, heritage, culture and diaspora in relation to structural violence. Sanzgiri will be in attendance and will participate in a conversation about his films following the screening.
This event is open to the general public. Admission to the program is free with a UNC ID.
At Home But Not At Home (2019), 11′
Sanzgiri’s father was 18 when India ousted the last remaining Portuguese colonizers from his home in Goa in 1961. Combining 16mm with drone footage, desktop screenshots, and Skype interviews with his father, Sanzgiri utilizes various modes of seeing at a distance to question identity, the construction of memory and anti-colonial solidarity across continents.
Letter From Your Far-off Country (2020), 17’
Shot with 16mm film stock that expired in 2002—the same year as the state-sponsored anti-Muslim genocide in Gujarat—and filmed amid the anti-CAA protests in Delhi, the filmmaker traces lines and lineages of poetry, history, songs, and ruins through a multitude of digital interventions, found footage, and more.
A search for solidarity in the sounds and colors of the spontaneous Muslim women led Shaheen Bagh movement in Delhi, in the poetry of Agha Shahid Ali, the song of Iqbal Bano, the theater of Safdar Hashmi, and images of B. R. Ambedkar—the radical anti- caste Dalit intellectual and founder of the Indian constitution—all surrounding a letter addressed to the filmmaker’s distant relative Prabhakar Sanzgiri, who wrote biographies of Ambedkar and was a Communist Party of India (Marxist) leader in Maharashtra.
Golden Jubilee, 2021, 19’
What is liberation when so much has already been taken? Who has come for more? “Golden Jubilee”, the third film in a series of works about memory, diaspora and decoloniality, takes as its starting point scenes of the filmmaker’s father navigating a virtual rendering of their ancestral home in Goa, India, created using the same technologies of surveillance that mining companies use to map locations for iron ore in the region. A tool for extraction and exploitation becomes a method for preservation.
The father, sparked by a memory of an encounter as a child, inhabits the voice of a spirit known locally as Devchar, whose task is to protect the workers, farmers, and the once communal lands of Goa. Protection from what the filmmaker asks? Sanzgiri’s signature blend of 16mm sequences, 3D renders, direct animation, and desktop aesthetics are vividly employed in this lush, and ghostly look at questions of heritage, culture, and the remnants of history.