An Impossible Address
Single-Channel, 38’, Super 16 to digital, CGI, 2025
A staccato of images and sounds punctuate a letter, both impossible to compose and deliver. This film culminates over four years of research around the bonds of mutual struggle for freedom that developed between India and Africa against the Portuguese empire, focusing on the life of Sita Valles, an Angolan-born doctor and revolutionary of Goan origin who joined the liberation movement against the Portuguese in Angola and was subsequently disappeared there. Scenes of wandering, words of longing, and animations from the architecture of the historic 1955 Afro-Asian solidarity conference in Bandung weave narratives of failure, possibility, and revolutionary desire. Combining the materialist techniques of burying, scratching, and chemically altering 16mm film, and Sanzgiri’s signature visual language of digital animations, 3D scanning, and archival translations, the film wrestles with its own form to test the efficacy of words and images in times of struggle, mourning, suffering, and action.