Film

Two Refusals (Would We Recognize Ourselves Unbroken?) & Golden Jubilee

Suneil Sanzgiri

Date and Time:: Sunday 14 June, 3–4 pm
Location:: Minassa

Two Refusals (Would We Recognize Ourselves Unbroken?) is an experimental film focusing on interwoven narratives around the mutual struggle against Portuguese colonialism between India and Africa and the bonds of solidarity that developed between the two continents. Told through a mix of interviews and fictional narratives, Two Refusals utilizes a blend of CGI animation, super 16mm film, hand-processed and destroyed archival film to uncover lost layers of world-building, kinship, and the material and immaterial network of relations that developed between historical figures in Goa, Mozambique, Angola, and Guinea-Bissau.

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.

Suneil Sanzgiri’s research-driven practice considers questions of inheritance and indebtedness in relation to histories of anti-colonial and anti-imperialist struggle across the Global South. Spanning experimental video and film, animations, essays, and installations, his work explores image-making, collective memory, and testimony, and are often in dialogue with the works of filmmakers, revolutionaries, and poets, drawing together a slippage between the living and dead. Beginning with an examination of his family’s legacy of resistance in Goa, India, to centuries of Portuguese colonial occupation, Sanzgiri's recent works contend with the possibilities of transhistorical and cross-continental solidarity, wrestling with their own forms to test the efficacy of words and images in times of struggle, mourning, suffering, and action.