Spectacle is honored to present its first collaboration with the Caribbean film collective Third Horizon: We Are Here As You Were There, a programme of short films by Annabelle Aventurin, Maxime Jean-Baptiste and Suneil Sanzgiri. In these three layered personal documentaries, diasporic filmmakers meditate on colonialism and its aftermath through compelling intergenerational collaborations, the films enfolding multiple histories of extraction, solidarity, and resistance.
On Thursday April 6, filmmakers Annabelle Aventurin and Suneil Sanzgiri will be present for a post-screening conversation with acclaimed author and academic Sukhdev Sandhu, followed by encore presentations later in the month.
THURSDAY, APRIL 6 – 7:30 PM followed by a discussion with filmmakers Annabelle Aventurin and Suneil Sanzgiri, moderated by Sukhdev Sandhu (This event is $10)
WEDNESDAY, APRIL 12 – 10 PM
FRIDAY, APRIL 21 – 7:30 PM
SUNDAY, APRIL 30 – 5 PM
THE KING IS NOT MY COUSIN
(LE ROI N’EST PAS MON COUSIN)
dir. Annabelle Aventurin, 2022
30 mins. France/Guadeloupe.
In French and Guadeloupean Creole with English subtitles.
The author of the book Sunny Karukera, Stranded Guadeloupe (1980), Elzea Foule Aventurin engaged, in 2017, in a series of interviews with her granddaughter, the Paris-based filmmaker Annabelle Aventurin. Together they trace—not without malice—a family history, sailing from one side of the Black Atlantic to the other, from the Caribbean to West Africa and back again. A history of silences, pride, and revolt.
MOUNE Ô
dir. Maxime Jean-Baptiste, 2022
17 mins. France/French Guiana.
In Guianese Creole and French with English subtitles.
By presenting archival footage of the festive events which accompanied the Paris premiere of the historical drama JEAN GALMOT, AVENTURIER (1990) by Alain Maline, in which the filmmaker’s French Guianese father played a minor role, the images of MOUNE Ô reveal the survival of the colonial inheritance within a western collective unconscious always marked as stereotypes.
GOLDEN JUBILEE
dir. Suneil Sanzgiri, 2021
19 mins. India/United States.
In Konkani and English, with English subtitles.
GOLDEN JUBILEE takes as its starting point scenes of the New York-based filmmaker’s father navigating a virtual rendering of their ancestral home in Goa, India, created using the same technologies of surveillance that mining companies use to map locations for iron ore in the region. A tool for extraction and exploitation becomes a method for preservation, in a ghostly look at questions of heritage, culture, and the remnants of history.
SUNEIL SANZGIRI is an artist, researcher, and filmmaker. His work contends with questions of identity, heritage, culture, and diaspora in relation to structural violence. GOLDEN JUBILEE is the final film in a trilogy of works about memory, diaspora and decoloniality, following AT HOME BUT NOT AT HOME (2019) and LETTER FROM YOUR FAR-OFF COUNTRY (2020), all Third Horizon Film Festival selections.
MAXIME JEAN-BAPTISTE is a filmmaker based between Belgium, France and French Guiana. His interest as an artist is to dig inside the complexity of Guianese colonial history by detecting the survival of traumas from the past in the present. His audiovisual and performance work is focused on archives and forms of reenactment as a perspective to conceive a vivid and embodied memory. His films include NOU VOIX (2018), LISTEN TO THE BEAT OF OUR IMAGES (2021, co-directed with his sister, Audrey Jean-Baptiste), and MOUNE Ô (2022), all Third Horizon Film Festival selections.
ANNABELLE AVENTURIN is a film archivist responsible for the conservation and distribution of Med Hondo’s archives at Ciné-Archives in Paris. In 2021 she coordinated, with the Harvard Film Archive, the restoration of Hondo’s films WEST INDIES (1979) and SARRAOUNIA (1986). She is also a film programmer. THE KING IS NOT MY COUSIN, a THFF selection, is her first film.
SUKHDEV SANDHU runs the Colloquium for Unpopular Culture at New York University.
THIRD HORIZON is a Caribbean film collective headquartered in Miami, Florida. Since 2016 it has hosted the Third Horizon Film Festival, an annual celebration of formally radical and politically aware cinema from the Caribbean, its Diaspora, and other spaces of the Global South. Third Horizon also makes films that center the stories of the Caribbean and its ever-expanding Diaspora.