Sunil Sanzjeri’s Anti-Colonial Films – ARTnews.com

Growing up as a young Suneil in suburban Dallas, Suneil Sanzgiri came to see how filmmaking could organize the experience of time. Realizing that editing allowed the director to disrupt and reconfigure the past and the present, linking the current experience with history, memory, and future fantasies in a single form. The artist, whose father emigrated from India to the United States in 1968, paid close attention to the formal techniques and political interests of authors from the subcontinent such as Satyajit Ray and Ritwik Ghatak. Their films, rich in critical images of colonialism and nationalism, allowed Sanzgiri to gain access to a cultural heritage he did not know firsthand.

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From this diaspora location, Sansgiri developed an experimental cinematic practice concerned with the ethics of mediating living history, specifically anti-colonialism in South Asia and its resonance in the present. To begin this journey, the artist began at home, drawing from stories told to him by his father. Shashi Sansgiri grew up in colonial Goa, where as a child he witnessed the independence and partition of India in 1947. As Shashi explains in At home but not at home (2019), brought these world historical events alive through personal experience: Gandhi’s assassination in 1948, for example, is still vivid in his memory because his cousin organized a memorial procession in their village.

New Talent: Suneil Sanzgiri's Anti-Colonial Films

Sunil Sanzgiri: A message from your far country2020, 16 mm film, 17 min.
Courtesy of Suneil Sanzgiri

These memories represent Sanzjeri’s treatment of history, which repeatedly telescopes from the family to the realm of national and international epic struggle. In a way reminiscent of fellow contemporary motion picture artists Naim Mohaimen, Bushra Khalili and the Otolith group, Sansgiri treats colonial history as a potential catalyst for revolutionary action in the present.

Shashi is a recurring character in Sanzjiri films. at A message from your far country (2020), for example, chronicles the life of Prabhakar Sanzgiri, a distant relative who was a communist union activist in the 1930s and 1940s onwards, and a biographer of anti-caste activist B.R. Ambedkar. Sanzgiri uses the compositional strategies of desktop cinema, formally comparing Prabhakar’s story to YouTube clips and text exchange with Shashi, as well as original 16mm footage of the 2020 student protests in Delhi against the Citizenship Amendment Act and the National Register of Citizens. These regulations, initiated by the right-wing government of Narendra Modi and his BJP party, threatened to strip thousands of Muslim citizens and minorities of their rights. Sansgiri puts contemporary protests into a still photo montage and finds footage of anti-sectarian and anti-capitalist activism from the past five decades.

New Talent: Suneil Sanzgiri's Anti-Colonial Films

Sunil Sanzgiri: At home but not at home, 2019, 16mm video and HD, 11 min.
Courtesy of Suneil Sanzgiri

Sanzjiri’s films are constantly reshaping our understanding of the past. golden jubilee (2021) uses Shashi’s childhood memory of the local spirit known as A Defshare To highlight the plight of farmers in Goa, whose livelihoods have been threatened by extractive mining practices. Scattered throughout the film are virtual models of Shashi’s ancestral home, and animations of Defshare, and shots of Goan landscapes captured from a reconnaissance drone – all coherent in a critique of the global scope of capitalism. together with At home but not at home And A message from your far countrythe film loosely forms a trilogy, suggesting that decolonization is best conceived as not a single historical event, but a continuous process of fits, spurs, rips, and gaps.

What makes Sansgiri an artist so relevant is not just his aesthetic and moral rigor, but his ability to reclaim history once robbed by imperialism and now threatened by ethnic and religious sectarianism. “What is liberation when so much has already been done?” He asks for an unembodied voice golden jubilee. Through his films, Sansgiri does not try to solve such questions, but he urges us to ask them seriously, persistently and with nuance.

This article appears in the May 2022 issue, p. 50– 51.

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