Curator and critic Katherine C. M. Adams speaks with artist-filmmaker Suneil Sanzgiri about the making of An Impossible Address, a new work developed between Angola, Goa, Portugal, and North America and presented across exhibition and cinema contexts. An Impossible Address has its American premiere at EMPAC later this month.
Katherine C. M. Adams (KA): Let’s start with the genesis of An Impossible Address and how it emerged from your previous films. Your filmography begins with the Barobar Jagtana trilogy (2019–21), which emerges from your family’s history—in particular, their resistance to centuries of Portuguese colonial occupation in Goa. You later made Two Refusals (2024), which deals with the anticolonial movement in Goa more broadly. I imagine Two Refusals introduced many people to Sita Valles, the Goan-born revolutionary who fought in the Angolan liberation struggle and who was ultimately disappeared, and presumably killed, by the state. Two Refusals touches on Sita’s story as part of its chorus of voices, but in An Impossible Address she is the central figure. Although An Impossible Address is less invested in the familial ties from Barobar Jagtana, it feels like a very personal work. Even though (auto)biography is there only as a contour, its epistolary framing lends the film a sense of personal desire and longing. The subjectivity of Two Refusals seems diffuse by comparison; we can’t necessarily read you directly into that film.
I recall you grappled a lot with how present or not you wanted to be in An Impossible Address during its production. I’m wondering if you can start here for a moment and root us in this dynamic. What led you to pursue Sita’s story further, and why did An Impossible Address end up taking the form of a letter from you to her? Can you share a bit about how you situate yourself in the work?
Suneil Sanzgiri (SS): The film questions how we speak to the dead, how language and image both transmit and reverberate across time and space, and how this notion of “address” can possibly intervene in that transmission. It’s an impossible task, as the film’s title alludes to. My (spoken) voice is absent in the film, and the language that is directed at Sita is never actually said out loud, though I have on many occasions actually recited it to myself. The reading of the letters takes place in the mind of the viewer. This silence also speaks (no pun intended) to the repressive forces of the state. State-sponsored mass disappearances, like the one that occurred in Luanda after alleged coup attempt of 1977, create a doubling of absence, a collective silence where families and entire generations are unable and unwilling to speak about the atrocities for fear of punishment. This is partially what the Lebanese writer Walid Sadek refers to as “the labor of missing.” This film is my attempt to grapple with the present conditions of struggle that Sita’s life and disappearance embodied.
So much of this work is about the tension between what can be said and what can never be said, particularly at a time when news from the genocide in Gaza places speech (and image) in a state of an abundance of meaning, even though it is impossible to comprehend the magnitude of violence that meaning tries to expresses. The term “no words” gets used a lot to describe the horrors we see on our screens. This absence or void of language is the primary context in which this film was made, though not its central subject. I was confronting it while making the film.
KA: Can you speak a bit about how you approached production in Luanda and the research you did into the local Angolan community’s lived experience of the post-coup moment? We’ve spoken before about the practical challenges filming in Angola presented as far as gaining access to many sites and getting interlocutors to feel free to speak about the postcolonial histories you explore relating to Sita. Perhaps because of that, it feels like the film is trying to get under the surface of the city. You recorded some of the very raw and dynamic moments in the street at night, and the score of the film is very free, teeming, intense. Whereas the seemingly most accessible, official, and filmable areas of the city—the state monuments, with their particular ideological scripts—are given to us visually in a very different way.
SS: Whenever I visit a new city, the camera responds in different ways. So much of it is circumstance. Many of the night scenes were filmed at a very slow frame rate by chance. My camera battery was dying, but I decided to keep filming, which resulted in kinetic nocturnal moments that were filmed at about four frames per second. I was invited by the daughters of Sarah Maldoror and Mário Pinto de Andrade—Annouchka de Andrade and Henda Ducados—to spend time in Lunada. They helped substantially during the production in various ways: they invited me to the archives of their father, who was integral to the liberation struggle but was ultimately exiled by his own former comrades, who are the same people who disappeared Sita and thousands of others, and they let me interview their uncle—Mário’s brother—who was also a guerilla fighter in the liberation struggle.
One of the things that isn’t immediately apparent in the film is the way that contemporary Angola exists in the shadow of its brutal twenty-seven-year-long civil war, one of the longest civil wars in modern history, which became a Cold War-era proxy war for the United States and apartheid South Africa. People who just two decades prior were killing each other now exist on top of one another, forced to live with each other in daily public life, in ways that are somewhat imperceptible. As an outsider with a strong attachment to the foundations of the country’s anticolonial and Marxist-Leninist origins, the things that I think stood out to me most were the residues in the fabric of the city that bear the traces of this moment of possibility in building a new world, the very things Sita, her brother Edgar, and her comrades all fought for. So many of the monuments and murals that visualized these certain utopian narratives are largely overlooked by people who live there, I think because their meaning has been rendered hollow by the authoritarian turn after decolonization, when the MPLA consolidated their power, developing a "petrol-nation" simultaneously reeling from the aftermath of their civil war. In many cases, the people I was with who grew up and lived in Luanda never even noticed some of the images, murals, and monuments on the sides of the road or in state-sponsored military museums. Why would one bother to visit such a place?
I was almost arrested for filming a small painting someone made of the first president of Angola—Agostinho Neto—on the facade of their building. It was a beautiful hand-painted portrait of his face, which is a face you see everywhere in the city. The police came and started yelling at me for filming there, which I guess was near a government building, and were about to arrest me. Luckily, I was able to get out of the situation by calling a friend who gave them some answer that got them to leave me alone. As I note in the film, Neto was the man who was responsible for Sita’s disappearance and the disappearance of thousands of others. Ironically, I had been given full access to film inside his mausoleum, which is this gigantic, towering brutalist monument visible from the whole city. Photos or images of his actual grave, though, are forbidden.
KA: This brings us to another facet of the film that is subtle but I believe quite important to its overall effect, which is landscape, both as a space of loss and frustration and one of commitment and imagination. Landscape becomes an important tool for handling the topic of forced disappearances by the state and political obfuscation more generally. The people who were allegedly dropped into these spaces were not drawn back out. Landscape in the piece also seems to connect the history in the film to a sense of contemporary political dislocation. These are often scenes in which the film’s aesthetic is at its most digitally mediated and speculative. Real and imagined terrains are navigated in a semi-virtual way, whereas other reference material is comparatively analog— newspapers, archival prints, et cetera. Can you speak a bit about this?
SS: The digitally rendered scenes are taken from available topographical scans of the region in the Angolan desert where it’s thought that many of the disappeared were pushed off cliffs or thrown out of planes and into massive craters. No one knows where Sita was disappeared, but some have speculated it could have been in this part of the desert. This is also the secondary meaning that the film’s title refers to: an impossible address as in an impossible location. The team I was working with on the digital renderings also went to Bandung, Indonesia, to the site of the 1955 Afro-Asian Solidarity Conference, which is now a museum dedicated to its memory. We scanned the iconic red chairs and the architecture of the space, which makes its way into the film later as a speculative ruin, and into the exhibition space at Mercer Union, where we installed them. The repeated imagery of the Bandung Conference chairs falling through the sky in the Angolan desert landscape evoked the feeling for me of the freefall of the present moment, this plummeting into oblivion. The viewer is trapped, perpetually plunging between these two spaces—one that marked the sort of inauguration of the optimistic left-wing internationalism of the Global South, and the other, which is the dark aftermath of these authoritarian turns in the conference’s wake.
KA: The making of An Impossible Address also coincides with a time when you have been grappling with the politics of the distribution of your work, forming strategies to avoid entangling your films with conditions that contradict the ethos of your practice, which is anti-imperial and in solidarity against colonialism in the present. So the concern for “address” feels, however implicitly, to be a question for cinema and art more broadly, especially at this time of intense censorship. Even if one’s work can be physically seen or shown, how can it truly be received where its politics are dispossessed? Of course, so many of your historical references—Sarah Maldoror, as an example, but many others—are striking up some kind of relation to the conditions of possibility for revolution. There is a scene toward the end of An Impossible Address in which you use a virtual rendering of a slightly decaying, (de)constructed version of the Bandung Conference, which includes a voice-over by a collaborator of yours, Yasmina Price, around the inheritances of postcolonial movements in the present. This approaches contemporary politics, though not necessarily in a prescriptive way.
Considering both the personal thread of your works and your political commitments, I was wondering if you could say a bit about how and whether you situate your work in relation to militant cinema more broadly, particularly in the midst of this time of “impossibility.” Is there something that one’s work should do beyond what the filmmaker themselves is doing? Is there a militancy to distribution that should take precedence over the militancy of film? Is there space for a filmic poetics that may be ambivalent and critical in a way that is perhaps protopolitical in its provocations? I suppose it’s a question of how a work like An Impossible Address, which reckons with collapses and breakdowns of a movement, situates itself in relationship to political action in the present. Is there a particular dialectic bridging the reflective and determinative moments in the film?
SS: A friend told me during the making of the work that it’s as if working with Sita’s memory has forced me to confront my own actions (and inactions) in the present. That point stuck with me, and I eventually explicitly added a line toward the end of the film that makes reference to that confrontation with the struggles of the present—particularly the ongoing anticolonial struggle for Palestinian liberation. What does this mean for those of us in the so-called belly of the beast, the imperial core? I think the question of what constitutes militant cinema is less interesting to me than what constitutes an artist engaged in struggle. I know plenty of filmmakers and artists that wield militant aesthetics or make reference to revolutionary idols, with nothing grounding their struggle. Many artists, poets, and writers of the Black radical tradition have made these questions clear—Amiri Baraka, Sonia Sanchez, June Jordan, et cetera—by laying out the task of the artist. James Baldwin says the artist’s responsibility is to make war with society. Paul Robeson says the artist must take a side: freedom or slavery. I do not know that art innately holds any more potential toward action than anything else does, otherwise we would have seen more action, as there is no shortage of art. But my question is: where is the artist in relation to struggle? Struggle against empire, against cooptation, against revisionism, against counterinsurgency, against elite capture? Who are you beholden to? Who are you accountable to?
Your question of “what should one’s work do separate from what the filmmaker is doing” is an interesting one, but more to the point—what are filmmakers even doing, period? I don’t think it’s a matter of separating the art from the artist, but to me personally I’ve just become so uninterested in works by people whose frameworks for thinking and making are not grounded in struggle. I know a lot of people have a problem with that—fine. It’s just not where I want to put my energy or attention. I think in many ways the question of strategy is essential, particularly when encountering the frontier of cultural institutional struggle and artwashing. There’s no shortage of tactics, no shortage of community orgs or mutual aid to get involved with. Pick one and engage. Find your role beyond the institution, beyond your career. There’s much I could say about that, but I believe it would be best for a separate conversation entirely.
The poetics of my work naturally result from the critical perspective one must adopt in relation to these questions, these contradictions and inconsistencies. Ultimately, the question is akin to: what do I want viewers to take away from my work? My work, I’d say, is not particularly radical or militant, but it is an opportunity to think, to re-access the past, present, and future. It invites a sense of confrontation with the questions that history asks of us, and says: where are you in this abyss?
KA: We worked together throughout most of the film’s production process. At one point, a number of questions came up around how to treat the archival material in the film—how legible or lush this atlas-like archive should be. In what ways should it be recombinant and speculative? Or should it instead be presented as historically cogent, with clear points of connection and causation? You shot the most archive-dense moments in a black box space [at EMPAC], and you made yourself physically present with the archives—swerving among them, moving through them, and rearranging them. The sense of staging was very palpable. From my perspective, it seems to me like some questions around archival visibility/opacity were partly resolved through performance, both your own movement and showing yourself “directing” the visual material, on film. Does performance feel like a generative way into your relationship with archival material here? Do you want to speak a bit about this “image forest” that we see punctuating the film throughout, and what it does to the film?
SS: We started working together, along with Aamna Muzaffar from Mercer Union (the film’s co-comissioner), during the height of the encampments, or what became known as the Student Intifada. In fact, I remember when the three of us had our first real call I had just come off an interview with Al Jazeera where I spoke about establishing with other comrades the first faculty encampment in the country, at the New School. By the time I went to EMPAC to work with you all I was in shambles, emotionally, physically, politically, spiritually. I was exhausted and burnt out from organizing at that intensity. It’s interesting thinking about those moments next to each other because in settings we had access to the large format printers. Comrades would print out these massive posters and images from the history of the Palestinian struggle, from the Palestinian poster archive, from images on social media, propaganda, et cetera, and plaster them all over the walls of the university. We actually used those images to block out right-wing journalists and agitators because many of the public-facing walls between the groups were just windows. So images were all around us in that moment, to keep us going, to inspire us, and remind us of our duty. I think coming to EMPAC I essentially recreated that process subconsciously, but in a more intentional manner, thinking across lines of Afro-Asian struggle and its contradictions.
The performance is a physicalization of montage, although a more materialist technique of scratching on film becomes an essential part of the end aesthetic. I knew as soon as we were filming these scenes, that after all that work I was going to just end up scratching all the images out on the film itself. Everything was too legible, too beautiful or neat. Despite the chaos, the backdrop for the shoot was a very pleasant environment that we kept referring to as “the forest,” which makes me think of the terrain in which the anticolonial guerilla fighters staged their battles. So there’s a tension between the legibility that you mentioned these images produce and these tidy narratives that need to be complicated or undone. The act of re-arranging creates fissures, ruptures, and breaks with historical grand narrative. For the exhibition at EMPAC, I’ve decided to restage those images on C-stands like in the film, but they are completely blurred, not legible at all. Only a faint trace remains.
KA: I wonder if you want to speak briefly to the presentation of this work at EMPAC. Specifically, for the installation of the film, you chose to work with fabric that you dyed using a natural process—you literally buried the fabric. What was your thinking around this, and why was this gesture important to you?
SS: One of the techniques I used, and make mention of in the very beginning of the film, is burying Sita’s image on 16mm film and unearthing it. The process is a familiar one in avant-garde film practices, but for me it is about the doubling of burial and retrieval—later in the film, false claims by the Angolan state that Sita’s remains had been discovered are revealed later in the film, and they’re quite disturbing. An independent forensic analysis called for by Sita’s family and other relatives of disappeared people found that the remains that the state claimed were Sita’s were not actually hers. For the installation at EMPAC, I took the muslin fabric that we used as scrims for “the forest” and buried it underground with compost and manure at a farm for about a month. (Muslin as a fabric also originates in the Indian subcontinent it turns out.) It was quite an emotional process, which I did not necessarily anticipate; the buried muslin resembled a shroud. Curiously enough, when I went to excavate the buried fabric this week it was missing. There was only a small trace left of the fabric. For the installation we are utilizing these remaining shards alongside other hand-dyed fabric strips. We’ll create new compositions out of the remains of the muslin, displayed alongside the film. I asked the farmer what happened to the buried fabric and he couldn’t figure it out, but believed the large compost piles could have been stolen. Disappearance followed me everywhere it seemed.
