Film Screening: Suneil Sanzgiri

A selection of films directed by Suneil Sanzgiri will be shown in advance of his AAD Arguments lecture on Wednesday, July 10th.

Two Refusals (Would We Recognize Ourselves Unbroken?) (2024)

Glimpses and hallucinations of solidarity and possibility through generations. A woman’s dreams become haunted by a mythological titan from Portuguese mythology that sought to destroy Vasco de Gama’s, preventing him from ever reaching India. Questions of what could have been emerge across ends to colonial occupations in India and Africa.


Barobar Jagtana Trilogy

At Home But Not At Home (2019)

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)

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)

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.

Organized by the MS in Advanced Architectural Design program as part of the AAD Arguments Lecture Series.