Two Refusals (Would We Recognize Ourselves Unbroken?). 2024. USA/India. Directed by Suneil Sanzgiri. 34 min.

An Impossible Address. 2025. USA/India/Angola. Directed by Suneil Sanzgiri. Commissioned by Mercer Union, Toronto; and EMPAC—Curtis R. Priem Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, New York. 38 min. New York premiere

Brooklyn-based filmmaker Suneil Sanzgiri (2022 Creative Capital Awardee) presents a pair of films exploring transnational solidarities and anticolonial movements. This event marks the premiere of his Creative Capital project Two Refusals, an experimental essay film that looks to sites of refusal, rejection, and revolt across India and Africa. 

Throughout his career, Sanzgiri has probed the history of mutual struggle against the Portuguese empire across Asia and Africa; notably between Angola and Goa, India, where Sanzgiri’s family originates from. Two Refusals (Would We Recognize Ourselves Unbroken?) (2024) recounts these networks forged of revolution and revolt in the 1960s and 1970s through interwoven interviews, repurposed poetry and images, and a script written by Sham-e-Ali Nayeem.

Deepening this research, his most recent film, An Impossible Address (2025), centers on Sita Valles, a Goan-born revolutionary who fought in the Angolan liberation struggle and was later presumed killed amid mass state-sponsored disappearances in the aftermath of Angolan independence. An Impossible Address recounts the search for traces of Valles across archives and in present-day Luanda, Angola, connecting the affective power of her absence to a broader reckoning with the legacy of Afro-Asian solidarities. Sanzgiri embraces an array of cinematic techniques and mediums—from Super16mm and CGI to scratch animation and physically burying archival footage to intentionally degrade its fidelity—to reflect on “the worlds that were glimpsed but did not come to pass.” One indelible sequence is haunted by specters of the past: Chairs from the 1955 Bandung conference are animated to float through the sky over an Angolan desert landscape, confronting a vital political moment in all of its vibrancy and dissonance.

The screening will be followed by a conversation with Sanzgiri, moderated by Sophie Cavoulacos, associate curator in the Department of Film.