Longing Suite, Nicolás Grandi & Lata Mani, Video, 28 mins, 2025

Longing Suite is a meditative videopoem that traces the arc of a heart-mind-body awakening to the Feminine Divine and the sacred in all that exists. Grandi and Mani build on a cycle of poems written by Mani in the 1990s to continue their transmedia experiments in kaleidoscopic storytelling. Drawing aesthetic inspiration from the dynamics of the spiritual journey Longing Suite offers an evocative visual and sensorial experience at once individual and universal.

“The textured weave of sound and image in Longing Suite leads us to a place that feels like spaciousness and intimacy all at once. This is not a description of sacred longing. It is a distillation of it. Love here is not sentiment, but blessed shipwreck. Desire is not decorative yearning, but desperation, delirium, drowning. Spare and immersive, this film offers us a map of the seeker’s journey. It also offers us the shiver of visceral experience. A swirl of images – implicating geographies both natural and cultural, and metaphors of diverse wisdom traditions – catapults us from faith as inheritance to firsthand encounter. We emerge not as bystanders, but as participants, stained by silence, altered by the windrush and stillness of this wild ride. Nicolás Grandi and Lata Mani’s hauntingly powerful film is both sacred arc and sensorium; pilgrimage and homecoming.”

Arundhathi Subramaniam, poet, writer on the sacred, and author of The Gallery of Upside Down Women and Wild Women: Seekers, Protagonists and Goddesses in Sacred Indian Poetry.