Suneil Sanzgiri’s (SMACT ’17) new film Letter From Your Far-Off Country will be making its World Premiere at the 58th New York Film Festival, in a new section called Currents. The film will be screening in Program 2: Free Radicals from September 23rd – September 28th.
Letter From Your Far-Off Country
Suneil Sanzgiri, 2020, USA/India, 17m
Drawing upon a rich repository of images—from digital renderings of Kashmir’s mountains to the textured materiality of 16mm hand-processing and direct animation techniques—Letter From Your Far-Off Country maps a hidden vein of shared political commitment and diasporic creative expression, linking a poem by the Kashmiri American writer Agha Shahid Ali, interviews with the filmmaker’s father, and a letter addressed to Prabhakar Sanzgiri, a leader of India’s Communist party and a distant relative of the filmmaker.
This new film follows his last work, At Home But Not At Home, which made its World Premiere earlier this year in January at International Film Festival Rotterdam with a Found Footage Award nomination. That film went on to make the rounds in festivals across the world and will be in competition at the 25 FPS Film Festival in Croatia and the Videoex Experimental Film and Festival in Switzerland.
Suneil Sanzgiri is an artist, researcher, and filmmaker working to understand how systems of oppression are informed and reinforced by collective forms of trauma, history, and memory. His work spans experimental video, animations, essays, and installations, and contend with questions of identity, heritage, culture and diaspora in relationship to structural violence. His work has been screened at festivals and galleries nationally and internationally. Sanzgiri was also selected as a co-programmer of the Flaherty Seminar NYC 2020.
