Artist Profile

Suneil Sanzgiri

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Suneil Sanzgiri is an artist, researcher, and filmmaker whose work contends with questions of identity, heritage, culture, and diaspora in relation to structural violence. Sanzgiri graduated from MIT with an MSc in Art, Culture and Technology in 2017. His work has been screened extensively at festivals and venues around the world including International Film Festival Rotterdam, New York Film Festival, Sheffield Doc/Fest, Doc Lisboa, Viennale, e-Flux, REDCAT, the Menil Collection, the Block Museum, and the Criterion Collection, and has won awards at BlackStar Film Fest, Open City Docs Fest, and more. He was named one of the “25 New Faces of Independent Film” in Filmmaker Magazine’s Fall 2021 Issue.

Featured Works

AT HOME BUT NOT AT HOME

11’, 16MM & HD VIDEO, 2019

A personal exploration of identity, cinema, and liberation through Skype interviews with my father growing up under Portuguese colonialism in India. Utilizing various methods and modes of seeing at a distance, this film questions the construction of artifice and memory through the moving image.

LETTER FROM YOUR FAR-OFF COUNTRY

18’, 16MM TRANSFER TO 2K, DCP, 2020

Filmed in expired 16mm stock amid the anti-CAA protests in Delhi, the filmmaker traces lines and lineages of ancestral memory, poetry, history, songs, and ruins through a multitude of digital interventions, found footage, and more.

A search for solidarity in the sounds and colours of the spontaneous Muslim women-led Shaheen Bagh movement in Delhi, in the poetry of Agha Shahid Ali, the song of Iqbal Bano, the theatre 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

19’, 16MM & 4K VIDEO, DCP, 2021

While navigating a virtual rendering of an ancestral home in Goa, 16mm direct animation, digital renderings, and surveillance technologies form a poem-reflection on colonialism’s legacy on a family and land.