Letter From Your Far-Off Country,
18’, 16mm transfer to 2k, DCP, 2020
Shot with 16mm film stock that expired in 2002—the same year as the state-sponsored anti-Muslim genocide in Gujarat—and filmed amid the anti-CAA protests in Delhi, the filmmaker traces lines and lineages of ancestral memory, poetry, history, songs, and ruins from his birth in 1989.
A search for solidarity in the sounds and colors of the spontaneous Muslim women led Shaheen Bagh movement in Delhi, in the poetry of Agha Shahid Ali, the song of Iqbal Bano, the theater of Safdar Hashmi, and images of B. R. Ambedkar—the radical anti-caste Dalit intellectual and founder of the Indian constitution—all surrounding a letter addressed to the filmmaker’s distant relative Prabhakar Sanzgiri, who wrote biographies of Ambedkar and was a Communist Party of India (Marxist) leader in Maharashtra.
Letter From Your Far-off Country is the second film a series of new works addressing ancestral memory, diaspora, history, decoloniality, and cross-continental solidarity. These themes, which run recurrent, think through a series of questions, reflections, and intimations of how we live through moments of trauma, violence, and revolt.
Starting with At Home But Not At Home (2019), which made its world premiere at the International Film Festival Rotterdam in January 2020 with a nomination for the Found Footage Award, Letter From Your Far-off Country continues interviews with the filmmaker's father, while blurring boundaries of the epistolary format through a letter written by the filmmaker directed towards a distant relative, who was a revolutionary freedom fighter, prisoner's rights activist, and Communist party leader.
Using the language of new media, video art, desktop cinema, and experimental film, these shorts look towards the slippery, unstable, and liberatory possibilities of the moving image, seeking to reclaim the past from erasure, and provide a journey towards a potential future.
OFFICIAL SELECTIONS (2021 - 2022)
New York Film Festival, Currents, 2020
International Film Festival Rotterdam, Ammodo Tiger Shorts Competition, 2021
BlackStar Film Festival, Best Experimental Film Award, 2021
Open City Documentary Festival, Best International Film Award, 2021
Videoex Festival, Winner, Grand Prix, 2021
Images Festival, Film Discreet Transfer Award, 2021
European Media Arts Festival, Jury’s Special Mention for Dialogue Award, 2021
Iowa City Documentary Festival, Jury’s Special Mention, 2021
IndieLisboa, 2021
Viennale, 2021
Punto de Vista International Film Festival, Competition 2021
Hong Kong International Film Festival, Competition, 2021
Berlin Critics Week/ Woche der Kritik, 2021
Sheffield Doc/Fest, 2021
Slamdance, Experimental Shorts, 2021
Atlanta Film Festival, 2021
Prismatic Ground, 2021
Third Horizon Film Festival, 2021
e-Flux Video & Film, Festival Forum, 2021
Los Angeles Film Forum, Memory Imaging: Explorations of the Personal and Collective, 2021
Camden International Film Festival, 2021
MUTA - International Audiovisual Appropriation Festival, 2021
Indian Film Festival Los Angeles, 2021
International Film Festival of South Asia, 2021
Mimesis Documentary Festival, 2021
Duluth Superior Film Festival, 2021
Nashville Film Festival, 2021
REDCAT @ CalArts
The Menil Collection
Karama Yemen Human Rights Film Festival
Festival International du Film sur l'Art
Cinematic Migrations: A Conversation with Renée Green on Time, Space, Movement, and Essayistic Forms
Cámara Lúcida - Internatcional de Cine Contemporáneo
Imagine Science Festival
Ethics & Aesthtics, Detroit Narrative Agency, Cinema Detroit
"Cinema of Breath" Squeaky Wheel Film & Media Art Center
Stills from Letter From Your Far-Off Country, 16mm to 2k video, 2020, 17 mins.