This sentence appears as an intertitle in two discrete films in New Delhi-based documentary filmmaker Amar Kanwar’s vast and ambitious art installation The Sovereign Forest (2011–present). It refers to the many forms of forced separation that accompany large-scale extractive projects in India’s rural hinterlands. More specifically, The Sovereign Forest attends to the violence of what sociologist Michael Levien has termed the “neoliberal regime of dispossession” in the Eastern Indian state of Odisha and surrounding regions, in particular the impact of mining operations in the Niyamgiri hills by meganational and multinational corporations.1 Kanwar presents a moving-image installation that is ongoing research into the many dimensions of such dispossession, alongside an exploration of the tenacity and creativity of anti-dispossession politics.

Born in New Delhi in 1964, Kanwar is one of India’s most prominent documentary filmmakers. From his earliest films, he has chronicled the inner workings of power and violence in...

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