Portugal stole Goa’s lands and narratives. Can they ever truly be returned?

Today a state on India’s southwest coast, Goa was, from 1505 to 1961, a Portuguese colony, and only formally reconised by Portugal as part of India in 1974. In his dense, lyrical meditation on his ancestral homeland, the Indian-American artist and researcher Suneil Sanzgiri combines 3D reconstructions, archival materials and more traditional documentary footage to probe complex questions of exploitation, identity and liberation in the wake of centuries of colonisation that still scar the Goan landscape. The third in a ‘series of works about memory, diaspora and decoloniality’, Golden Jubilee (2021) is a provocative and often haunting work of experimental filmmaking, upending Eurocentric narratives while rejecting familiar tropes and easy answers at every turn.