Film Program: Who Makes The World Go Round

Index welcomes you to Who Makes The World Go Round, a film program curated by Nour Helou.

To learn, know, and accurately share the history of colonized people’s struggles for freedom is an individual and collective duty—an ever so urgent responsibility in a mediatized world of manipulated narratives, amnesia, and twisted truths.

Claudia Pagès Rabal’s work examines how histories are layered within architectural structures such as cisterns and stones—material forms that store memory. By exploring the etchings on cistern walls and the history of the surrounding town, Pagès Rabal uncovers the various people and powers that have occupied these sites. She states that “these two cisterns and the insistence of the mark on their walls made [her] think of the settler’s time, which does not work in a linear way, but in a cartographic way, in superposition.”

This film program is titled Who Makes The World Go Round. It invalidates the spatial and temporal logic of imposition and erasure central to colonial superposition. The program asserts that the moving image can make visible those individuals and actions that occupation forces try to suppress or erase from official narratives and history.

Indeed, the filmmakers in this program center the voices of those impacted by colonial violence: makers who testify to their lived experiences, refusing the lies of mass media. In doing so, they write back into a history that sought to write them out.

Who Makes The World Go Round will start with a viewing of a trilogy of shorts by Indian-American filmmaker Suneil Sanzgiri: At Home But Not At Home (2019), Letter From Your Far-Off Country (2020), and Golden Jubilee (2021). In these films, Sanzgiri departs from a close look at his family’s history in Goa, India, a city colonized by the Portuguese, where violence was repeatedly enacted by the colonizers and resisted by freedom fighters. The case of Goa is hardly unique, which the filmmaker makes apparent by recounting moments of global solidarity and resistance.

The film program ends with Walid Raad and Jayce Salloum’s feature film Up to the South (Talaeen a’al Junuub) (1993), a frank documentary assembling interviews of Southern Lebanon citizens. The film examines the conditions, politics, and economics of South Lebanon in 1993, which are revealed to not be much different from today’s reality in 2025.

Program

Saturday 18 October 16:00
At Home But Not At Home, Suneil Sanzgiri, 2019, 11min
Letter From Your Far-Off Country, Suneil Sanzgiri, 2020, 18min
Golden Jubilee, Suneil Sanzgiri, 2021, 19min
Up to the South, Walid Raad & Jayce Salloum, 1993, 60min

Films
At Home But Not At Home (2019, 11min), Suneil Sanzgiri
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.

Letter From Your Far-Off Country (2020, 18min), Suneil Sanzgiri
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.

Golden Jubilee (2021, 19min), Suneil Sanzgiri
What is liberation when so much has already been taken? Who has come for more? Golden Jubilee, the third film in a series of works about memory, diaspora and decoloniality, takes as its starting point scenes of the 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. The father, sparked by a memory of an encounter as a child, inhabits the voice of a spirit known locally as Devchar, whose task is to protect the workers, farmers, and the once communal lands of Goa. Protection from what the filmmaker asks? Sanzgiri’s signature blend of 16mm sequences, 3D renders, direct animation, and desktop aesthetics are vividly employed in this lush, and ghostly look at questions of heritage, culture, and the remnants of history.

Up to the South (Talaeen a’al Junuub) (1993, 60min), Walid Raad & Jayce Salloum
An oblique, albeit powerful documentary that examines the conditions, politics, and economics of South Lebanon in 1993, which are revealed to not be much different from today’s reality in 2025. Indeed, the South of Lebanon has been continuously bombed by Israel since October 2023. The tape focuses on the social, intellectual, and popular resistance to the Israeli occupation, as well as conceptions of “the land” and culture, and the imperiled identities of the Lebanese people. Simultaneously, the tape self-consciously engages in a critique of the documentary genre and its traditions.

Biography
Nour Helou (b. Lebanon) is a writer and researcher curious about the ways we relate to each other. She has a BA in Art History from the American University of Beirut and an MA in Performance Studies from New York University. Through engaging with archives, Helou has been following and illuminating transformations of beauty standards and gender norms in South-West Asia and North Africa (SWANA) via exhibitions held in Sweden with artist Afrang Nordlöf Malekian. As a film programmer, she has worked at Shasha Movies, an independent streaming service for SWANA cinema, which she helped launch in 2020. Nour was also part of the Noncitizen Film Collective in Sweden where she was a project manager. She has previously published writings through the Arab Image Foundation Lab, Glänta, and is represented in the Swedish Public Art Agency art collection. In NYC, Helou has worked at Performa and ArteEast. When the fruits are ripe, Helou is also a certified pastry maker.