Darkness gives way to a tempestuous seascape as the camera glides over choppy waters, gradually tilting towards a distant cliff. An ominous cloud swells over the landmass. Its presence is unsettling, yet something else feels amiss. The waves are too evenly spaced, their white foam overly sharp. The billowing clouds have an unnatural geometry. A subtle dissonance begins to emerge from within the fabric of the image. Is this footage real or computer generated? This question is perhaps futile. Concerned less with clear legibility and more with the affective possibilities that irresolution can provoke, Suneil Sanzgiri’s moving image practice finds its rhythm in moments of slippage. His work blends experimental and documentary modes to create layered compositions in which biography brushes against the undercurrents of history, and where the evidentiary status of the image is kept deliberately unstable.

Screened together at this year’s Open City Documentary Festival, Two Refusals (Would We Recognize Ourselves Unbroken?) (2024) and An Impossible Address (2025) extend Sanzgiri’s ongoing exploration of Afro-Indian solidarities under the Portuguese Empire, addressing questions of loss and the politics of imaging technologies in relation to anti-colonial struggle. Both works confront the entangled afterlives of resistance movements across Goa, Angola, Mozambique, and Guinea-Bissau, whose legacies remain suspended between revolutionary fervour and disenchantment. Grounded in extensive research, Sanzgiri’s formally inventive work has a spellbinding poetic sensibility. The artist-filmmaker's distinctive intermedial approach – spanning 16mm film, CGI animation, archival materials, and photogrammetry scans – mirrors the fragmented realities mapped throughout his body of work. His latest films and installations attend to what pushes at the limits of language and representation, of fact and fiction. The image glitches, and so does history.

In the opening sequence of Two Refusals, a woman’s dreamworld is disrupted by Adamastor, a mythical character who embodies a storm. Drawn from the Portuguese epic poem Os Lusíadas (1572) by Luís de Camões, the titan represents an early expression of resistance to imperial expansion, as it aimed to destroy admiral Vasco da Gama’s fleet on its voyage to India. Although unable to halt the expedition, Adamastor persists as a spectral counterforce to colonial conquest. Its unruly presence is especially significant in the context of Goa, the homeland of Sanzgiri’s ancestors, which remained under Portuguese rule for 450 years until its incorporation into India in 1961. Through Adamastor, Sanzgiri mobilises mythical time to draw unseen forces into the fabric of the visible world. Evoking a speculative past, the film asks what Goa might have become had colonisation never taken place.

While Sanzgiri’s earlier Barobar Jagtana trilogy – comprising At Home But Not At Home (2019), Letter From Your Far-Off Country (2020), and Golden Jubilee (2021) – navigates diasporic experience and Goan identity through conversations with the artist’s father, Two Refusals expands to trace broader trajectories of anti-colonial resistance. Attentive to matters of inheritance, Sanzgiri uses citation to invoke traditions of emancipatory filmmaking. Extracts from Ruy Guerra’s Mueda, Memória e Massacre (1979) and Sarah Maldoror’s Sambizanga (1972) underscore the fact that revolutionary struggle does not arise in a vacuum, but circulates across borders in continuous relation to earlier movements.

Two militant women constitute narrative anchors within Two Refusals’s splintered historical landscape: Angolan doctor and communist revolutionary Sita Valles and Goan liberation fighter Sharada Sawaikar. Sanzgiri interlaces archival and contemporary footage to trace their stories alongside the liberation movements they fought for, adopting an elliptical form to chart a networked, cross-continental geography of resistance. Crowded market streets, Sita’s family photographs, Angolan guerrillas, and lush jungle landscapes appear in prismatic superimpositions, at times saturated with colour filters or distorted through heavily manipulated celluloid. The film’s drifting atmosphere is heightened through evocative passages penned by poet Sham-e-Ali Nayeem, who collaborated with Sanzgiri on the script. Delivered with a somnambulistic cadence in Konkani, reflections on memory and utopian desire are interwoven with Sharada’s testimony, which surfaces intermittently through filmed interviews. Ideals of national liberation sit in tension with sequences that illuminate the troubled, often violent aftermath of postcolonial transition. Resisting romanticised visions of the nation as a parental figure, Two Refusals complicates identity formation along nationalist lines. Belonging emerges as a fraught and fragile condition, as unmoored as the images themselves.

Sanzgiri describes his practice as being in communion with the past, which is conceived as a latent force that ripples into the present. This sense of transhistorical intimacy feels especially palpable in An Impossible Address, which expands on the brief but remarkable life of Sita Valles, who fought for Angola’s liberation from Portuguese rule before being forcibly disappeared in 1977. Unfolding as a letter addressed to her, the film trades voice-over narration for onscreen text, allowing its confessional tone to resonate inwardly. The title takes on a double meaning, evoking both a failed attempt to communicate with the dead and the unknown location of Sita’s remains. While this unbridgeable gap is difficult to bear, the artist treats it as a catalyst. Sita’s memory becomes a guiding presence, animating encounters beyond the limits of the colonial imagination.

Dislocation is employed as a structuring principle, with linear chronology eschewed in favour of a kinetic collage set to a jazz score. Handheld shots of Luanda’s vibrant nights are intercut with images of Lisbon’s streets, while interviews and documents depicting different moments of anti-colonial insurgency are brought into relation. Sanzgiri revisits the legacy of the 1955 Bandung Conference, a landmark summit of Asian and African nations aimed at promoting cultural and economic cooperation, self-determination, and decolonisation during the Cold War. In one of the film’s most arresting sequences, dozens of digitally rendered red upholstered chairs fall from the sky into the hazy abyss of a virtual landscape. The camera tumbles with them, whirling uncontrollably through pink and orange-toned clouds. Scans of the original chairs used at the conference, these pieces of digital furniture stage a scenario at once impossible and historically specific.

This way of conjuring detail lies at the heart of Sanzgiri’s practice. The artist frequently manipulates the material properties of digital and analogue media to perform piercing cine-exhumations. Blurring, scratching and warping emerge not merely as iconoclastic gestures, but more significantly as acts driven by a reanimatory impulse. To unearth the past, however, is also to accept the possibility of reactivating its pain, especially when it involves stories marked by failure and unresolved grief. Navigating the points of friction within resistance movements, Sanzgiri’s films ask what it might mean to “work through the pain of coalition”, as cultural worker Jemma Desai put it during the post-screening conversation at the Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA). Solidarity is thorny, and to practice it is to inhabit its contradictions.

Sanzgiri’s commitment to thinking through the interrelated nature of collective struggle extends beyond the screen. He seeks to align the politics of his films with those of their exhibition and circulation, a principle that also informs his public interventions. The artist prefaced his conversation with Desai by expressing solidarity with Palestine and calling on the ICA to sever ties with entities complicit in Israel’s ongoing genocide against the Palestinian people. If cinema holds the capacity to shape a shared relation to the world, it may also reassert our connection to realities in which we remain implicated.

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Lola Lemke: Poetry plays a significant role in your practice. Do you see your work as relating to traditions of revolutionary poetry that were central to anti-colonial educational initiatives, particularly in Angola and Guinea-Bissau?

Suneil Sanzgiri: Poetry has been essential to my work in many ways. I’m not sure I would describe my practice as an extension of that tradition necessarily but, thinking about how those forms function, poetry has often served as an educational tool. In Guinea-Bissau, for example, it became a core part of the curriculum in clandestine mangrove schools after the Portuguese bombed educational centres. Poetry was essential in this context because it was able to distil class, revolutionary, and anti-colonial consciousness into succinct ways of understanding the world and, more specifically, of relating to the land. Cinema, especially experimental cinema, also utilises poetic offerings. The difference, I think, is that written poetry explores language intimately, while the visual form defies language. In many ways, it does so much more. Yet both are ultimately about feeling.

Thinking about revolutionary poets, most anti-colonial leaders had a poetic practice. Agostinho Neto and Amilcar Cabral met at the House of the Students of the Empire in Lisbon [Casa dos Estudantes do Império], where they began writing. They used poetry to bypass the censorship of the Portuguese colonial entity, as it was not seen as a possible site of anti-colonial consciousness. But students were communicating with one another through poetry. This is how they were able to circulate their messages, tying notions of land, belonging, suffering, ancestry, and slavery into the coded language of poetry.

LL: In ‘Un-Meshing The World’, a text you wrote for Open City’s Non-Fiction Journal in 2023, you suggest that ‘the lacunae of the image is perhaps our best chance to escape our already hyper-meshed world.’ Could you speak more about your understanding of opacity as a formal and conceptual strategy?

SS: When I wrote that I was thinking a lot about gaps and aporias, and understanding images in that way, specifically in Golden Jubilee. In his performance at the festival, Miko Revereza talked about sneaking meaning into images, about packing as much meaning as possible into them and then sneaking them across borders, which I really loved.

I think the question of opacity is interesting because I’m a very privileged filmmaker. I have an American passport and I don’t really face censorship in the same way as many other exilic filmmakers do. I don't necessarily have the same burden, so it becomes a question of why I am not more overt sometimes. I often am publicly and definitely online – probably too much – but the work is something else. I think more than anything opacity is an opportunity for abstract thought. I was very much raised in the tradition of conceptual art. I studied conceptual art but I’m not a good conceptual artist. I’m too much of a maximalist.

LL: Who were you influenced by?

SS: I don’t think she would consider herself a conceptual artist, but my mentor Renée Green was a big influence on me. I’m interested in ways of documenting gesture and simple poetic acts. Art gives us the opportunity to do things we might not otherwise do. When I think about the opacity of images, for me it’s really about the possibility of thinking outside rigid structures and of denoting meaning. I’m also more interested in what the audience brings to the work. A lot of it is about collaborative meaning-making. Even though I have an interpretation of each image, and each image has a really robust story behind it, I ask myself: what combinations of sound, text and image can be co-created with the audience?

LL: In terms of opening pathways to abstract thinking, your work problematises the idea of the impossible: what is impossible, and according to whom or to what logic? It invites viewers to reflect on the limits of their own imagination. How do you engage with these horizons of possibility?

SS: Certainly, the goal is to get us outside of the realm of the impossible. I think it’s tough because things are changing so quickly and naturally my thoughts are changing constantly. There has been a lot of focus on speculative futures, or, as my friend Tausif Noor puts it, the thinking-otherwise-industrial-complex. I’ve been heavily influenced by scholars like Saidiya Hartman and Christina Sharpe. The question of what could have been is central to Two Refusals, which partakes in the kind of thinking-otherwise-industrial-complex to some degree. It’s complicated because we need to focus on the present. We can’t think otherwise if we can't also think in the present tense. Speculation on the past sometimes replaces action in the present, and we must confront the present in moments of rupture if we are to preserve the possibility of shaping a different collective future.

LL: Your work experiments with montage, with pushing against the slicing of time into discrete notions of past, present, future, and against narratives that excise us from past struggles. How does this collapsing of timelines allow you to reconsider the writing of history?

SS: I’m a Benjaminian in that sense. It’s interesting because the Frankfurt School has really fallen out of favour recently. Many people have been very critical of it, perhaps rightfully so in terms of its proximity to Empire. But Walter Benjamin has been one of the biggest influences on my thought and practice; I often think of his Theses on the Philosophy of History. I recently went to a talk by Benjamin scholar Eduardo Cadava, who offers a close reading of The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, with the underlying assumption that it’s often been misread. It’s actually a very anti-fascist text, specifically because he argues that nothing is original. The entire idea of originality is fascist. Everything that he does within the text is a reference to the limits of language; for Cadava, every word has a meaning that can be traceable. Everything has a lineage to it. This is what the Zionist entity and all settler-colonial projects seek: a permanent present – continuous and fixed – that obliterates the past to secure a settler-colonial future. The Palestinian writer Adam Haj Yahia writes about this in his essay ‘The Principle of Return’.

Film can open up a different temporal logic in this context by disrupting the distinction between past, present, and future. Especially in the installation of An Impossible Address. That is what the images are doing in this kind of setup. An Impossible Address is really trying to confuse those time periods and frustrate them in ways that are disconcerting.

I think what film, and montage in particular, can do that is interesting is to place two things that are unlike next to each other and force, in a true dialectical sense, some sort of synthesis. There were people who critiqued my film, Letter From Your Far-Off Country, because I experimented with this kind of proximity, placing Ambedkar and the Dalit struggle next to the communist movement, which was led by ‘upper caste’ Brahmin intellectuals. Some viewers pointed out that the communists never did anything for the Dalit struggle. This tension is generative for me, it reveals certain contradictions that must be confronted.

LL: Sharada Sawaikar and Sita Valles, two militant women, are central figures in Two Refusals. Sharada’s songs, which bear witness to enduring suffering and the need to remember despite the pain of doing so, are especially moving. What led you to focus on their stories?

SS: It was a result of how few accounts of them exist. I actually interviewed another Goan militant who was considered the Che Guevara of Goa. But as soon as Sharada started singing, I thought, this is it. This says everything. With Sharada, it was all about the songs. They are so evocative. She told me that she had written these songs on scraps of food wrappers and bits of paper while she was in prison. She was a schoolteacher and, at the same time, taught girls military skills, including how to wield rifles. While sharing the story of her torture, she also said, “I survived because you needed me.” That, to me, was important.

When I rewatched it at the screening last night, I wondered if I had focused too much on the torture. Maybe it felt a bit gratuitous. But then I realised I did that because she includes these throwaway lines that are so powerful and important to me within the same sentence – the same breath – as she describes her torture. She knew she had an obligation to the future, to the generations that came after her to stay alive.

LL: I noticed that Two Refusals and An Impossible Address use the same interview footage with Sita Valles’s brother, Edgar Valles…

SS: There is a very practical reason for this. The films were made for different contexts, for installations and exhibitions. I wanted An Impossible Address to stand alone, to be able to be seen without having seen Two Refusals, because I knew there would be audiences who hadn’t encountered the previous film. There are also specific expository passages from Edgar's interview that I needed to include. These are moments that bear repeating. I think it’s important for Edgar and Sita to be reintroduced as core figures. “She was a doctor of medicine and she was also a revolutionary,” Edgar says. I love the statement and the way it introduces her. When I rewatched it, I wondered if audiences might think that I'm going to reuse the entire interview. There are so many parts I wish I could have reused, especially where Edgar talks about Stalin and how, back then, they had no idea the USSR was committing all these crimes. It is interesting to think about how information used to flow, compared to how inundated we are with information now.

LL: Thinking about how this overload shapes what we come to understand as ‘real’ today, what are your thoughts on the artist-filmmaker as a mediator, someone who observes, researches, and makes connections, filtering reality through film?

SS: Maybe that’s giving me too much credit… Maybe I shouldn’t be the one filtering information, although my films do come from a place of trying to make sense of what I encounter on my newsfeed on a daily basis. But it is me thinking publicly. I’m not necessarily asking other people to listen. The goal for me is for everyone to be the mediator, for the audience to be able to negotiate information for themselves. We shouldn’t ask artists to do that. I really want people to develop their own consciousness, and I hope that the film can be utilised as a way of thinking personally, even if you disagree. Last night, Alia Syed [an artist who was in the audience] had a problem with some of my choices. I thought: fantastic, I hope you do.

LL: There was a panel at the festival called Political Films/Making Films Politically, which you attended. How do you respond to that idea?

SS: I mean, it’s an unanswerable question. There’s never going to be a satisfactory answer. I think if you're already asking yourself that question, then you’re probably starting in the wrong place. You’re perhaps a bit lost. People know what it means to be in struggle. You know when you’re in it. I think we understand that culture plays a role, but I think we’ve maybe overestimated it. We’ve made ourselves a bit too self-important. Still, culture certainly does play a role.

The panel did make me think about the way Palestine is coming to be co-opted, aestheticised. This happens to all political struggles. To evoke the Frankfurt School again, I think about the politicisation of art and the aestheticisation of politics. They discussed how the aestheticisation of politics lends itself to being digested by capitalism. I was worried about that. I was also working with Sarah Maldoror’s daughters, Annouchka and Henda. Their father is Mário Pinto de Andrade and I was using images of him and Amilcar Cabral, who was his best friend. I asked for their permission to use these images because I know they’re very careful with them. They’re incredible images, really phenomenal, but they became too aestheticised for me – too fetishised, too romanticised.

It’s the same thing with the relics of my ancestors. There are guns and swords in my grandmother’s ancestral home that still have the dry blood of the Portuguese colonisers they killed. That’s incredible, but why is that incredible to me? Why am I so obsessed with the fetish object? I think a lot about how resistance appears onscreen. The camera as a gun is an adage that has been around for quite some time.