At Home But Not At Home

11’, 16mm & HD Video, 2019

In 1961, 14 years after India gained independence from Britain, the Indian Armed Forces defeated the last remaining Portuguese colonizers in the newly formed state of Goa. My father was 18 at the time, and had just moved away from his small village of Curchorem to Bombay for school when news reached him about his home—now free from the oppression of a foreign hand after 450 years of colonial rule. After spending years thinking about questions of identity, liberation, and the movement of people across space and time, I find myself returning to this period in search of moments of anti-colonial solidarity across continents. My research took me from the shores of Goa, to Indonesia, Mozambique, and Angola, finding brief links between nascent liberation movements and my father’s biography.

Combining 16mm footage with drone videography, montages from the "Parallel cinema" movement in India, desktop screengrabs, and Skype interviews with my father, the resulting film utilizes various methods and modes of seeing at a distance to question the construction of artifice, memory, and identity through the moving image.

OFFICIAL SELECTIONS (2020 - 2021)

International Film Festival Rotterdam, Found Footage Award nomination,
25 FPS Festival, Competition
Videoex Festival, International Competition
Queer Lisboa, Short Film Competition,
London Indian Film Festival, Satyajit Ray Short Film Competition,
Beijing International Short Film Festival, International Competition, Outstanding Artistic Exploration Award nomination
London Short Film Festival
Onion City Experimental Film + Video Festival
Alchemy Film and Moving Image Festival
Maryland Film Festival
Imagine Science Film Festival
Mimesis Documentary Film Festival
Marseille Underground Film and Music Festival
Experimental Film Guanajuato
San Diego Underground Film Festival
AT THE FRINGE International Arts Festival
Coalition of South Asian Film Festivals
15th Pravo Ljudski Film Festival Sarajevo
Third Horizon Film Festival 
Kyiv International Short Film Festival 
Lo Schermo dell’Arte 

Additional Screenings:

PLATFORM ASIA, Royal College of Art London, Backlit Gallery, Phoenix Cinema and Arts Centre, and Vivid Projects
Besides the Screen Conference
Chen’s World Remote
Late Capital
The Block Museum
RhizomeDC Virtual Microcinema
bi’bak/Sinema Transtopia 
World Organization of Video Culture Development 
Labocine, South Asia Foreground 
Now-Instant Image Hall & Mascot Studio 
ImageUnionTV