On the Berlinale and the Films of Suneil Sanzgiri

The stream of news out of the 2024 Berlinale has made me more and more glad that most of the publications I write for honored the Strike Germany call to boycott the festival. Not content to merely be considered complicit in funding genocide and repressing protest, festival leadership has dug the hole deeper and deeper, inviting (then uninviting) far right politicians, advertising an absurd tiny house where “dialogue” about the Middle East could be contained, and finally condemning pro-Palestine statements made by winning artists and promising to prosecute activists who hacked a social media account to post about the genocide.

Between these political issues and the change of leadership (this was the final year of Carlo Chatrian’s tenure as artistic director, which had arguably made the Berlinale the best of the major festivals), it feels like the value of large festivals as a place for visionary and radical art is in serious doubt. We desperately need independent community infrastructure that can support artists and writers and an arts community that can act politically without being compromised by ties to the industrial and state apparatus. Obviously there’s no easy or rapid path to building something grassroots that can replace the role of large, historic festivals, maybe that can’t happen at all without broader political change, but alarm bells should be ringing for anyone invested in cinema’s future, and we should be doing everything we can to support independent and politically active platforms, publications, and artists.

One such artist is Suneil Sanzgiri, who was one of the few to pull their work from Berlin in honor of the call to boycott (see his statement). I’ve enjoyed seeing Sanzgiri’s experimental shorts over the last few years through Prismatic Ground, and made a point of seeing his latest (which was already one of the Berlinale films I was most looking forward to) when I heard he’d joined the protest.

The first three films are deeply diasporic in both form and content. At Home But Not At Home (2020) begins with the artist composing an E-mail on screen asking a photographer in Goa—where the Sanzgiri family is from, but Suneil had never been—to shoot drone footage for him of locations he knows only through stories. It cuts to that drone footage, showing this place always above and from a distance. The film is composed entirely of found, borrowed, and mediated materials in this manner, using 3D modeling, laptop and phone screen capture, and archival footage to speak not just about a family home and history, but the artist’s distant and interrupted relationship with them.

Letter from Your Far-Off Country (2020) uses a similar mixed media approach. Combining texts from interviews with the artist’s father, a letter addressed to Communist Party leader Prabhakar Sanzgiri, and a poem by Kashmiri-American writer Agha Shahid Ali, it explores the family’s intertwined history and political activism. The poem is read aloud at a protest while we see hand-processed 16mm footage of city life, the letter is read by Sanzgiri’s father on a Skype call. Text, sound, and image are always displaced from one another, time and distance bridged by the internet. Meanwhile we see allusions to an internet ban and conservative citizenship laws, bags of undelivered mail, and an actress protesting the murder of a Communist Party member. The distance that structures the film is not just physical, but a matter of political violence.

Golden Jubilee (2021), which I think is the best of all the films, continues this politicized excavation of family history. Much of its visual material is derived from 3D modeling of the old family home, and the film concerns the history of Portuguese colonialism. The family moved at one point to escape persecution from the colonial government, and personal material related to the family is contrasted with hand-altered archival footage of talking head apologists for the Portuguese and British colonizers. The film introduces a glossier sort of digital photography than appeared in the earlier two, and deliberately confuses the difference between this footage and digital animation, contrasting both with the physicality of film sources (which prominently show their degradation, color bleed, and so on). Again, our grasp on histories familial and political are incessantly mediated by the compromised tools and sources we have to approach them, and always a confused hybrid of retrospective fiction and historical memory.

The latest work, and the one that had been scheduled to show in Berlin, is Two Refusals (Would We Recognize Ourselves Unbroken?), a two-channel installation piece which is currently showing as part of a solo exhibition at Brooklyn Museum which also includes several non-film elements (see Phil Coldiron’s write up on the whole exhibition). Thematically, Two Refusals follows the threads of political violence and exile from the earlier films, but formally it’s quite a departure. It’s composed primarily of high definition digital photography, along with clips from feature films related to colonial history and anti-colonial resistance (Sambizanga, et al), and concerns a pair of freedom fighters rather than Sanzgiri’s own family. It still relies on various forms of juxtaposition, but interestingly, the two channel format is used in a more subtle way than the mixed media of the earlier works, and Two Refusals leans into a more conventionally “serious” gallery aesthetic, pairing interview closeups with archival footage or wider shots that relate to the text of the interview. (At other times the two screens form one wide panoramic image.)

It’s less innovative and radical than the other films, but it’s well composed. The two channel format is at its most effective when it’s most subtle, particularly in a few sequences where the two screens show the same material at difference focal lengths or rates of movement. A zoomed in shot of a photograph next to a wider shot revealing that photograph floating in the water; a close shot of the motion of an oar next to a wider one of the boat. These sequences generate an effective sense of complex scale and motion that emphasizes the complementary character of different angles and points of view rather than stark contrasts.

I’m emphasizing form here, but it’s a deeply political and documentary work. Joshua Peinado has written in some depth about the political histories involved, so I won’t repeat that here, except to say that the central idea, which can be applied to all of Sanzgiri’s work, is that of history and political change as a process, rather than a singular event or fact. The past leaves its mark and shapes everything we see and do in the present. We continue to fight for liberation, but it never comes easily or immediately or completely.