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On “Letter from Your Far-Off Country”

“When the student at Jamia Millia Islamia University first uttered ‘Dear Shahid’ right after the film's intertitle, I felt a tightening in my chest. It reminded me of my own days in Mumbai at Prithvi Theatre, where idealism was somehow removed from politics and the marginalization that was occurring. When I first saw the film, I felt like I knew this person.”

Letter from Your Far-Off Country, a short film by Suneil Sanzgiri, was shot on 16mm film stock that expired in 2002—the same year as Gujarat’s state-sponsored anti-Muslim genocide. The film weaves through forms and footage of a dizzying variety, from epistolary family stories, Agha Shahid Ali’s poetry, the theater of Safdar Hashmi, the Muslim women-led Shaheen Bagh movement, and more, creating a mosaic of temporalities that probe the personal and political together within the context of a fraught nation.


As part of our event In Grief, In Solidarity we screened the film, which had been screened just prior at the Indian Film Festival of LA (IFFLA). Here, we show the post-screening Q&A that followed the screening, where xenior editor Vamika Sinha talked to Suneil Sanzgiri and Ritesh Mehta, senior programmer at IFFLA, about the film, how Sanzgiri pulled off his very experimental film, what motivated it, and his intellectual and aesthetic preoccupations.


In particular, Sanzgiri talks at length about how the weaving of his personal history connected not just with the Shaheen Bagh movement and CAA protests broadly, but with the fact that protests in India included books by Ambedkar and Arundhati Roy alongside those of Angela Davis, while protests in the US played or sang music by Faiz, Agha Shahid Ali, Iqbal Bano at Black Lives Matter protests. These evocations of a global struggle were key to his approach to filmmaking. Mehta discusses his own emotional response to the film, which was deeply connected to his own experience in theatre in Bombay, and what it felt like to process much of what India had undergone recently, as refracted through Sanzgiri's prism.


Letter From Your Far-Off Country is available through the Criterion Collection.


In March 2024, Sanzgiri discussed his approach to form at our launch event, “Solidarity: Beyond the Disaster-Verse.”

Letter from Your Far-Off Country, a short film by Suneil Sanzgiri, was shot on 16mm film stock that expired in 2002—the same year as Gujarat’s state-sponsored anti-Muslim genocide. The film weaves through forms and footage of a dizzying variety, from epistolary family stories, Agha Shahid Ali’s poetry, the theater of Safdar Hashmi, the Muslim women-led Shaheen Bagh movement, and more, creating a mosaic of temporalities that probe the personal and political together within the context of a fraught nation.


As part of our event In Grief, In Solidarity we screened the film, which had been screened just prior at the Indian Film Festival of LA (IFFLA). Here, we show the post-screening Q&A that followed the screening, where xenior editor Vamika Sinha talked to Suneil Sanzgiri and Ritesh Mehta, senior programmer at IFFLA, about the film, how Sanzgiri pulled off his very experimental film, what motivated it, and his intellectual and aesthetic preoccupations.


In particular, Sanzgiri talks at length about how the weaving of his personal history connected not just with the Shaheen Bagh movement and CAA protests broadly, but with the fact that protests in India included books by Ambedkar and Arundhati Roy alongside those of Angela Davis, while protests in the US played or sang music by Faiz, Agha Shahid Ali, Iqbal Bano at Black Lives Matter protests. These evocations of a global struggle were key to his approach to filmmaking. Mehta discusses his own emotional response to the film, which was deeply connected to his own experience in theatre in Bombay, and what it felt like to process much of what India had undergone recently, as refracted through Sanzgiri's prism.


Letter From Your Far-Off Country is available through the Criterion Collection.


In March 2024, Sanzgiri discussed his approach to form at our launch event, “Solidarity: Beyond the Disaster-Verse.”

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ALSO IN THIS ISSUE:
Kareen Adam · Nazish Chunara
A Dhivehi Artists Showcase
Shebani Rao
A Freelancer's Guide to Decision-Making

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Live
Los Angeles
Indian Film Festival of LA
Film
Film-Making
Gujarat
Pogroms
Letter From Your Far-Off Country
Gujarat Riots
Genocide
Jamia Millia Islamia
Epistolary Form
Shaheen Bagh Movement
CAA Protests
Ambedkar
Arundhati Roy
Black Solidarities
Internationalist Solidarity
Global
Agha Shahid Ali
Safdar Hashmi
Avant-Garde Form
Avant-Garde Traditions
Communist Tradition
Faiz Ahmed Faiz
Iqbal Bano
Avant-Garde Aesthetics & Protest
Farmers' Movement
Diasporas
Temporality
Avant-Garde Film
Short Film
Personal History
Directors
Intertext
Mikhail Bakhtin
Black Lives Matter
Prithvi Theatre
Diasporic Distance
Unspeakable

SUNEIL SANZGIRI is an artist, researcher, and filmmaker. Spanning experimental video and film, animations, essays, and installations, his work contends with questions of identity, heritage, culture, and diaspora in relation to structural violence and anticolonial struggles across the Global South. His first institutional solo exhibition Here the Earth Grows Gold opened at the Brooklyn Museum in October 2023. His films have circulated at film festivals and institutions globally, including at the International Film Festival Rotterdam, New York Film Festival, Hong Kong International Film Festival, Criterion Collection, among others.

RITESH MEHTA works in film/TV development as a story consultant for production companies and mentorship labs, and as a festival programmer. He was raised in Mumbai and is based in Los Angeles.

5 Jun 2021
Live
Los Angeles
5th
Jun
2021

PRITHI KHALIQUE is a visual designer and animator based in Dhaka and Providence.

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